Institutional investors dumped $133 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) investment products last week, marking the largest week of outflows since June last year.
According to the latest edition of CoinShares weekly report on digital asset fund flows, overall digital asset fund outflows for the week ending Friday amounted to $120.1 million. Large outflows from bitcoin were marginally offset by an astonishing $38 million inflow of FTX Token (FTT) products.
Outflows of $132.7 million from BTC funds last week bring outflows for the month of April to $310.8 million.
The last time BTC funds saw this level of single week outflows was during a strong downtrend in June 2021 as a result of a large FUD on the news, including Tesla’s discontinuation of BTC payments for its cars over environmental concerns and the rollout of China’s cryptocurrency mining ban.
CoinShares noted in the report that There doesn’t seem to be a strong indicator as to why a similar level of bearish investment sentiment had resurfaced last month, but he pointed out a couple of potential factors:
“The precise reason for this is difficult to determine, apart from the aggressive rhetoric from the US Federal Reserve and the recent fall in prices.”
Like many other major assets and various stock market indices, the price of BTC has suffered significantly over the past 30 days, falling roughly 18.2% to stand at $37,970. at the time of writing this article. Many observers attribute this to fears that inflation and upcoming Federal Reserve interest rate hikes will cause the BTC price to sink further.
Overall month-to-date (MTD) outflows for all digital asset products tracked by CoinShares totaled $326.1 millionsuggesting that institutional investors have been looking to de-risk overall with cryptocurrency investments.
“This figure does not reflect the same downward trend seen earlier this year, although it is close to the $467 million outflows that occurred. Regionally, outflows were split fairly evenly between the Americas at 41% and Europe at 59%,” CoinShares wrote.
Bitcoin’s closest competitor for the top spot in cryptocurrencies, Ether (ETH), has also suffered from bearish sentiment lately; products offering exposure to ETH saw outflows of $25 million and outflows of $82.3 million on the MTD.
At the other end of the spectrum, crypto exchange platform FTT-linked funds and NFTs saw $38 million worth of inflows, but as FTT funds are classified in the “other” category, it is unclear if this is part of a larger trend. Notably, the FTT price is also down 24.5% in the last 30 days.
The Terra and Fantom investment products also recorded minor inflows of $390,000 and $250,000 each.
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