Outflows Rock Bitcoin As Institutional Investors Pull The Plug, More Downside Coming?

Outflows have been the order of the day since the price of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin had begun to crash. The same sentiment had spread through individual as well as institutional investors, leading to massive sell-offs in the space. Despite the price of bitcoin recovering in recent times, it seems that the sellers are not done just yet as outflows had ramped up over the last week.

$453 Million Leaves Bitcoin

Bitcoin had been seeing a reversal trend with inflows coming in for the prior week. However, this has only been short-lived as outflows have continued to rock the digital asset. For the last week, CoinShares reports that bitcoin had led the outflow trend and the net outflows had come out to $453 million for the digital asset. It is one of the largest outflows ever recorded for the digital asset and has wiped out the majority of inflows on a year-to-date basis.

Related Reading | Bitcoin May Not Reclaim All-Time High For Another Two Years, Binance CEO

This comes as bitcoin’s price had continued to fluctuate around $20,000 over the last week. It was expected that the low prices would trigger more inflows into the market for the past week but the opposite has been the case. The total assets under management (AuM) for bitcoin now sits at $24.5 billion, the lowest it has been in more than a year. 

BTC recovres above $21,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Its short-bitcoin counterpart had gone a different path this week where inflows had been the order of the day. The $15 million that flowed into it is said to be a result of the first US-based short investment product which launched last week. Given that the older short-bitcoin investment products had recorded outflows for the same time frame, all fingers point towards the launch.

Ethereum also saw inflows, a first in three months. It came out to a total of $11 million flowing into the altcoin after suffering 11 weeks of outflows.

North American Outflows Grow Worse

The outflows have been localized to one specific region and that is the North American corner of the market. CoinShares notes that the majority of the outflows had come from Canadian exchanges. Specifically, one provider. Most of the outflows had been seen on 17th June but did not show up until last week. It shows that these sell-offs had been a trigger for bitcoin’s decline to $17,700.

Related Reading | Crypto Liquidations Settle As Bitcoin Recovers Above $21,000

Digital asset investment product outflows were just as large with $423 million flowing out of the market, a new record for the space. However, given the lag that led to the trades from the Canadian exchanges updating late, it is important to know that these outflows were not from last week alone. When these outflows are removed and marked to their correct time frames, it shows that inflows of $70 million had been recorded by other providers.

The last time record outflows were seen was at the start of the year when $198 million had left the market in a single week in January. The outflows recorded for last week have surpassed this by more than 100%, although the ratio to the assets under management remains low compared to the bear market outflows of 2018 where outflows had reached as high as 1.6% of total AuM. 

Featured image from MARCA, chart from TradingView.com

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