Grayscale 2026 Q1 Investment Map Revealed: 50+ Crypto Assets Selected as Candidates

【BlockBeats】Grayscale officially announced on January 13th the “Potential Investment Target Candidate Asset List” for Q1 2026. This list covers over 50 crypto assets across five major categories, signaling a new institutional investment deployment.

In terms of smart contract platforms, Grayscale focuses on mainstream ecosystems such as Aptos, Arbitrum, Polkadot, and Tron, while also looking at emerging high-performance chains like Monad and MegaETH. This indicates that Grayscale is scanning investment opportunities across Layer 1 and Layer 2 ecosystems.

In the DeFi sector, Grayscale’s candidate assets are particularly abundant—top DeFi protocols like Morpho, Pendle, Sky, Hyperliquid are all included, and even projects like Euler, which experienced hacking incidents but persisted in rebuilding, are listed. This reflects institutional recognition of the maturity of the DeFi ecosystem.

Notably, there is a focus on AI projects. AI tokens such as Grass, Kaito, Worldcoin, and Virtuals Protocol are within Grayscale’s consideration scope, confirming the market expectation that the AI sector will continue to heat up in 2026.

Additionally, consumer culture tokens like Bonk, public service projects like Layer Zero and Wormhole, and cross-chain infrastructure are also included. Grayscale emphasizes that this list represents digital assets not yet incorporated into its investment products but marked as potential future targets by the internal team. In other words, being listed means being closer to institutional capital acceptance.