“It is difficult to ascertain the precise reason for this other than the hawkish rhetoric from the US Federal Reserve and the recent price decline,” CoinShares noted. Last week, institutional investors sold $133 million( R2.1bn) worth of Bitcoin (BTC) investment products, the highest week of outflows since June of last year.
The overall digital asset fund outflows for the week ending on Friday reached $120.1 million( R1.9bn), according to the latest edition of CoinShares’ weekly Digital Asset Fund Flows report. Large Bitcoin withdrawals were mitigated partially by $38 million( R601 m) in FTX Token (FTT) product inflows.
The $132.7million ( R2.1 bn) in BTC fund outflows last week increase the month-to-date outflows from BTC funds to $310.8 million( R4.9 bn).
The last time BTC funds witnessed this level of outflows in a single week was during a strong bearish trend in June 2021 as a result of huge FUD in the news, such as Tesla suspending BTC payments for its automobiles due to environmental concerns and China implementing its crypto mining ban.
CoinShares observed in the research that there does not appear to be a solid indicator as to why a similar degree of adverse investment sentiment revived last month, although it did refer to a few plausible factors:
“It is impossible to pinpoint the precise cause for this, other than the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive rhetoric and the recent price decrease.”
BTC’s price, like many other key assets and stock market indexes, has dropped dramatically in the last 30 days, falling around 18.2% to $37,970( R600k) at the time of writing. Many observers believe that this is due to concerns about inflation and the Federal Reserve’s planned interest rate hikes, which will cause the price of Bitcoin to fall even more.
Overall month-to-date (MTD) outflows for all digital asset products tracked by CoinShares reached $326.1 million( R5.2 bn), indicating that institutional investors have been aiming to reduce risk with crypto investments across the board.
“This does not show the same bearishness experienced at the start of the year, but it is close to the US$467m( R7.4 bn) outflows witnessed.” “The outflows were rather evenly split regionally, with The Americas accounting for 41% and Europe accounting for 59%,” CoinShares noted.
Ether (ETH), Bitcoin’s nearest challenger for the top slot in crypto, has also suffered from a bearish sentiment recently, with products offering exposure to ETH incurring $25 million( R396 m) in outflows and $82.3 million( R1.3 bn) in MTD outflows.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, funds linked to crypto exchange and NFT platform FTX’s FTT received $38 million (R601 m)in inflows, but because FTT funds are classified as “other,” it is unclear if this is part of a larger trend. Notably, the price of FTT has fallen by 24.5% in the last 30 days.
Terra and Fantom investment products both had tiny inflows of $390,000( R6.2 m) and $250,000( R4 m), respectively.
