Peter Mintzberg is the CEO of one of the world's most famous crypto brands—but, even within the industry, he is not a familiar name. Unlike his predecessor at Grayscale, who was a fixture of TV and social media, Mintzberg has stayed entirely out of the public eye since the company announced his appointment nearly a year ago. That silence has been strategic.
Mintzberg is a longtime Wall Street insider—his most recent stint was Global Head of Strategy at Goldman Sachs—but is a relative newcomer to crypto, which has a distinctive culture of its own. Lying low has given him time to fully immerse himself in the world of digital assets, and it has also bought time for Grayscale to navigate a competitive landscape that has changed dramatically.
A pioneer in the early digital asset industry, Grayscale went on to become the face of a bold legal fight to expand access to Bitcoin through ETFs. Now, though, the company finds itself competing with both traditional crypto firms and giant newcomers like BlackRock, while also figuring out how to offset huge outflows from what was long its core product. This was the challenge awaiting Mintzberg when he took the reins. In his first interview as Grayscale CEO, he revealed he is now ready to step into the public eye and shared plans for the company's future.
Grayscale's strategic challenge
Mintzberg, who is in his 50s, has a salt-and-pepper beard and a friendly affect that masks an extraordinary drive and ambition. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a lower-middle class family, he was determined at a young age to ascend to the top of the U.S. business world, and worked incessantly to get there.
Landing an analyst job with McKinsey in Brazil after college, Mintzberg's embrace of 15-hour days led the company to sponsor his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he recalls reading three cases a night while bringing his English up to speed. Upon graduating, Mintzberg co-founded an asset management company before moving up rapidly in the world of finance, ascending to senior management positions at BlackRock, Oppenheimer Funds, and Apollo. His most recent role at Goldman Sachs included overseeing digital assets under the firm's wealth management business.
Mintzberg has proved he can operate at the highest levels of Wall Street, but now he must prove he can transfer those skills to the crypto context. At Grayscale, he enjoys the benefit of a familiar brand and a reliable cash flow, but he also faces a major strategic challenge.
For years, Grayscale enjoyed a first mover advantage by building a series of trusts to hold crypto—most famously the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust or GBTC—that could be bought in the form of shares on the stock market. At a time when regulators had yet to approve a Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale raked in revenue thanks to annual 2% management fees it charged to hold its customers' pool of Bitcoin assets whose value at one point swelled to nearly $28 billion.
In January of 2024, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission—in response to a successful court ruling in favor of Grayscale—ruled that Bitcoin could be sold in the form of low cost ETFs. The legal victory made Grayscale the toast of the crypto community by opening the door to a flood of new investment from institutional investors, but it also placed Grayscale in a tough spot: It could slash the fees on GBTC (which the company converted to an ETF) to keep its customers from fleeing to cheaper rivals, but that would also mean a hit to Grayscale's main source of revenue.
Grayscale elected to reduce its GBTC fee to 1.5%, which was better than 2% but a far cry from the 0.25% fee offered by its giant new competitors, BlackRock and Fidelity. Predictably, a sizable portion of investors pulled out of GBTC, though the hit to Grayscale has been mitigated by soaring Bitcoin prices and a broader crypto boom—a boom that was touched off by the ETFs launching in the first place. As of mid-April, GBTC still had total assets of around $16 billion, though newcomer BlackRock has already amassed close to $46 billion. Meanwhile, outflows have slowed to a trickle as remaining customers, due to fear of a tax hit or simple inertia, have let their money stay put.
Shortly before Mintzberg's tenure began, Grayscale launched a "mini" GBTC with an industry-leading fee-rate of 0.15% as part of a plan to mitigate outflows and attract new customers. The fund has been a modest success as the mini has amassed around $3.5 billion in assets, albeit with a reduction in margins for Grayscale of over 90%.
This is the hand dealt to Mintzberg at the outset of his CEO tenure last August, and he has already laid considerable groundwork to update Grayscale's business model.
A salesforce and big plans for revenue
In its early years, Grayscale was located in the Flatiron district in Manhattan but today its headquarters is in Stamford, Connecticut along with the other portfolio companies that make the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group. Sitting in a conference room with fine views of Long Island Sound, Mintzberg recalls a recent trip to Miami—one of over a dozen he has taken to meet clients for meetings that last for a day or more.
The meetings are part of a long game Mintzberg is pursuing to draw clients into the larger world of Grayscale offerings that are expanding at a rapid clip. These include current or planned ETFs that provide exposure to a broad range of crypto assets, as well as funds built around the sale of covered call options, which provide a Bitcoin-based income stream. Mintzberg also sees a big opportunity to generate revenue by helping to manage networks like Ethereum (a process known as staking). According to Grayscale, the company has gone from launching or seeking regulatory approval for one product a month in 2024 to doing the same for five products a month in 2025.
As he works to deepen Grayscale's relationships with deep-pocketed clients, Mintzberg is also building out a national sales force that has grown to 19 people. He declined to name specific entities but, in his work as a Wall Street asset manager, Mintzberg worked with customers ranging from family offices to sovereign wealth funds. It appears this is the playbook he intends to pursue at Grayscale and, if it works, could eventually pull billions of dollars of new capital into crypto assets.
None of this will be as easy as charging 2% to sit on Bitcoin, as Grayscale did for years, but it has the potential to set the company up with a diverse array of longterm income streams. In the meantime, Grayscale says its "mini" Bitcoin ETF is more than holding its own, pulling in a share of new inflows that is four or five times what would be expected for its market share.
Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas, who tracks crypto ETFs closely, says Grayscale's mini ETF strategy is a clever one, but added "You can fight on fees with BlackRock and that will pay off in flows. But to make additional revenue, the answer is innovation."
To that end, Balchunas says Grayscale is on track to do this with its focus on novel ways to offer crypto exposure. He also praised Mintzberg's low-key approach upon taking the CEO job, pointing out that, after years of media glare related to regulatory fights, it's given the company time to craft a new narrative.
For now, it appears Mintzberg's biggest challenge is to turn Grayscale's new business lines into significant revenue.
In the long term, Grayscale founder Barry Silbert says he has no doubt the company will accomplish this, not least because he believes the crypto asset market will inevitably grow into an industry worth $3-$10 trillion. "Grayscale is poised to be the next BlackRock or Vanguard in the same way those firms pioneered index investing or Pimco pioneered the bond market."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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