Grayscale has handed financial advisors a ready-made crypto allocation with a striking omission: no bitcoin at all. The asset manager’s new Digital Assets Next Gen model portfolio assigns the Grayscale XRP Trust ETF a 26.11% weight, making XRP the second-largest holding behind ether. The four model portfolios went live on September 14, 2026, extending Grayscale’s reach from single-asset products into preconstructed strategies that wealth managers can apply across client accounts.
The full lineup
The suite includes four strategies: Digital Assets Core Plus, Digital Assets Leaders, Digital Assets Next Gen and Digital Assets Infrastructure. All four are market-cap weighted, rebalanced quarterly, and cap any single asset at 40% of the portfolio. Grayscale Advisors LLC, a registered investment adviser, distributes the models directly to financial platforms, which then make them available to advisors for use in client portfolios. Advisors keep final discretion over how allocations are applied, meaning the models set the framework but not the trade.
Core Plus is the broad foundational strategy, combining bitcoin and ether with select leading assets such as solana and chainlink. Leaders is designed to hold the five largest eligible digital assets available through Grayscale’s single-asset exchange-traded product lineup, so its composition changes as market-cap rankings shift. Infrastructure targets protocols supporting smart contracts, tokenization and other foundational applications across the digital asset economy.
Where XRP fits in Next Gen
Next Gen excludes bitcoin and can hold up to 10 established or emerging crypto assets. As of August 31, the model held seven funds. According to Grayscale’s allocation sheet, ether leads at 42.34% through the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF. The XRP Trust ETF (GXRP) follows at 26.11%, and solana takes 21.09%. Hyperliquid sits at 5.76%, with the remainder spread across chainlink, avalanche and sui.
Ether, XRP and solana together account for roughly 89% of the model. In Grayscale’s own sector breakdown, XRP constitutes the entire “Currencies” slice at 26.11%, while smart-contract platforms make up 65.47%. The Next Gen model’s tracked performance period began July 27, 2026, and it had generated a 30.69% net return through mid-September, a figure Grayscale publishes for the strategy even though most of the underlying funds trade below their launch prices.
In the Leaders model, which does include bitcoin, XRP drops to an 11.92% weight. Ether still leads that strategy at 38.57%. The contrast between the two models shows how much of XRP’s new prominence depends on bitcoin’s absence rather than a standalone conviction call.
Timing matters
The allocation landed at a volatile moment for XRP. The token fell about 9% to near $1.28 on September 16 after the Senate voted 49-50 to block the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act from advancing. The failure removed, for now, the prospect of a dedicated US market-structure framework for digital assets, and it hit XRP harder than most large tokens because traders had priced a favorable outcome into the token’s late-August rally.
Still, demand for regulated XRP exposure has held up better than most of the crypto ETF complex. US spot XRP ETFs took in $11.26 million on September 14, their third-largest daily haul of the month, all of it through Bitwise’s XRP fund. Cumulative net inflows across the seven US XRP funds reached roughly $1.71 billion, with combined net assets near $1.58 billion, about 1.71% of XRP’s market cap. The funds collectively hold around 1.1 billion XRP.
On September 15, the day the Senate vote failed, XRP funds recorded zero net flow while bitcoin ETFs lost $450.33 million and ether funds shed $141.47 million, their worst single days in months. XRP had logged one outflow day in the prior stretch, a $7.2 million exit on September 2, against $190.5 million of cumulative inflows over the same period.
Why the weighting is notable
A model portfolio weight is not a price forecast. Grayscale sets the allocation as a sector view, and advisors decide whether to use it. But the structure matters: XRP is no longer just available through an ETF, it is being embedded in portfolio strategies that advisors can apply across client books. That creates a recurring, rules-based source of demand tied to rebalancing rather than sentiment.
Goldman Sachs was the largest disclosed institutional holder of XRP ETFs as of June 30, with about $87.4 million in exposure, according to second-quarter filings. Jane Street and Millennium also ranked among the top holders. Filings do not show whether those positions are directional bets or hedging and market-making inventory, a distinction CoinDesk has flagged before when covering Goldman’s bitcoin ETF holdings.
The GXRP fund itself is not new. It began trading on NYSE Arca in November 2025, and some social media posts on September 15 misread the portfolio news as a new ETF launch. What changed this week is its role: Grayscale now presents XRP as a core allocation in a bitcoin-free strategy, a placement that would have been hard to imagine when the token was still fighting its regulatory battles in court.
What to watch
The first quarterly rebalance will show whether Grayscale treats the 26.11% weight as a floor or a starting point. Advisor adoption is the other variable. Grayscale’s models only generate demand if platforms actually surface them, and the firm has not disclosed how many platforms will carry the suite at launch. If adoption follows the pattern of traditional model portfolios, flows arrive gradually and cluster around rebalancing dates, which would make XRP’s ETF demand less dependent on daily sentiment than it has been so far.