October 7, 2025
Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. Great Scott, it’s only Tuesday! Let’s dive in.
We haven’t talked about “Uptober…”
…and received some feedback about this. Sigh.
Yesterday we talked about Bitcoin’s ATH (all-time high). A lot of people are blaming it on…what is it exactly…a meme?...a thing?...called “Uptober.”
The idea is that there’s been an anomaly, historically, where Bitcoin’s price grows in October. There’s some sense where this doesn’t just apply to Bitcoin. Vibes matter, they say. So some people get excited for October. They think Bitcoin prices, and maybe also prices of other on-chain assets, will go up during the month.
Something to keep an eye on? Not financial advice. Do your own research. We were required to write about this.
We were not awake in time to write about this yesterday
From Grayscale Investments very early yesterday morning:
“Grayscale Investments…today announced a major industry first: Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (Ticker: ETHE) and Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF (Ticker: ETH) have become the first U.S.-listed spot crypto ETPs to enable staking. Grayscale also revealed that Grayscale Solana Trust (OTCQX: GSOL) has activated staking, giving investors one of the only ways to access SOL staking through a traditional brokerage account. Pending regulatory approval of GSOL’s uplisting as an exchange-traded product, it is expected to become one of the first spot Solana ETPs with staking.”
We just did a quick command-F (control-F for our esteemed consultant, banker, and private equity readers) and we have never talked about staking on the Meridian Update. Until today.
If you are holding a $1 bill but you don’t want to hold it anymore, you might store it in a vault. Actually, you might ask a bank to store it in their vault, or do whatever a bank does with your $1 bill. According to bank heist movies, that is to store it in a vault. The bank might then promise to give you more than a $1 bill back. The longer you ask them keep the $1 bill, the more they might give you back when you come to retrieve your $1 bill. You already know this. You have seen all the high-yield savings accounts, we are sure. The ads are everywhere.
But what if instead of a $1 bill you have $1 of one of those US dollar stablecoins the media has been talking about so much of late? Well, you don’t have to worry about holding the $1 of US dollar stablecoins. It’s not a physical bill. It’s on-chain.
Does that mean you can’t put it in a vault somewhere to get more money back when you take it out? No, it doesn’t mean that. Of course, there is something called staking. Staking is kind of like putting an on-chain asset in a vault. In return for putting the money in the vault, you might get a reward. Specific forms of staking are like lending your money to someone who wants to borrow money through a platform, but they specifically want to borrow on-chain money and you specifically have on-chain money to lend. In that situation, the staking reward comes from the interest the borrower pays to lend that on-chain money.
So what’s the deal with this Grayscale Investments announcement? Well, GSOL is a way to buy an on-chain asset off-chain. It’s not a DAT, though. It is an exchange-traded fund (ETF). You actually can’t buy it on-chain. Of course, assuming no one tokenizes it. (That’s a joke. We think?) No, this is a thing you can buy, say, in your old-fashioned brokerage account, off-chain. But it is like holding SOL, the native token of the Solana network, on-chain. But it is not that. It is off-chain. And now you can stake that off-chain thing the way you might stake SOL on-chain to earn staking rewards. But you get to do this off-chain.
We tried. We failed. This was not simple enough. We will try and try again to do justice to staking and SOL ETFs.
That’s a wrap
The Meridian Update writers are not paid enough to explain the Grayscale SOL ETF and staking and how the Grayscale SOL ETF enables staking. Not at 6:30am ET, not ever. Also, it’s Uptober (or it isn’t, past performance does not…).