Grayscale, the world’s largest digital asset–focused investment platform, announced today that its Grayscale® Near Trust has begun trading on the OTCQB® market operated by OTC Markets Group Inc., under the ticker GSNR. The move marks a key step in Grayscale’s strategy to bring private digital-asset offerings into public markets and broaden investor access to next-generation blockchain networks.
The Trust, which has been offered via private placement to accredited investors since May 2024, is one of the first investment vehicles designed to give exposure to the token that powers the Near protocol, NEAR. With the GSNR listing, investors can now buy and sell shares through many brokerage accounts in the same way they trade other unregistered securities.
“This milestone demonstrates Grayscale’s commitment to advancing our products through their full lifecycle, from private placements to public markets,” said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Head of Product & Research at Grayscale. “With GSNR, investors can gain exposure to NEAR in certain brokerage accounts, reflecting Grayscale’s role in connecting next-generation networks with established market structures.”
Exposure to Emerging On-chain Innovation
Grayscale framed the listing as part of a disciplined product progression: private offering → public vehicle → eventual ETP. That staged approach, the firm says, helps validate investor exposure to emerging on-chain innovation while delivering institutional-grade wrappers for tokens that power new blockchain ecosystems.
NEAR, the protocol behind the token, has positioned itself as a high-speed, low-cost blockchain tailored to artificial intelligence use cases. Co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, an ex-Google researcher and co-author of the Transformer paper widely credited as foundational to modern AI, Near has developed on-chain features known as “intents.”
These intents are intended to reduce developer and user friction by simplifying cross-chain interactions and transaction complexity; recent integrations have also appeared on other next-generation smart contract platforms such as Sui.
Grayscale highlighted the broader industry importance of such technical advances, noting that on-chain innovation is likely to shape the next decade of financial and technological development. By listing GSNR on OTCQB, Grayscale said it aims to make it easier for investors, advisors and allocators to access the NEAR token exposure within familiar market structures.
Founded in 2013, Grayscale has built a suite of single-asset, diversified and thematic products intended to help investors access the digital economy. The firm emphasized that moving offerings from private placements into public markets is part of its longer term plan to convert eligible products into exchange-traded products (ETPs) where appropriate.
