Institutional investor sentiment has been on the rocks for some time now. This follows the market trend with bitcoin falling below $22,000 and the total crypto market cap finally making its way below $1 trillion once more. With this, institutional investors continue to show a more bearish attitude toward the market. The numbers for last week are in, and the outflows from various digital assets show that big money is not betting on bitcoin.
Institutional Investors Exit Bitcoin
The exit from bitcoin by institutional investors has been a couple of weeks in the making now. The last two prior weeks had seen these investors pulling their money out of the digital asset. Now, these volumes were not the largest ever seen by any margin, but they paint a grim picture for institution investing going forward.
For the third week in a row, bitcoin had recorded outflows in the market. Most of the bearish sentiment from investors had fallen on the digital asset, and it recorded another week of outflows with a total of $15 million. It is $6 million lower than outflows recorded for the prior week.
The bullish trend has also spread to short bitcoin over this time. Where the short bitcoin had seen inflows of a total of $2.6 million for the prior week, it only saw inflows of $0.2 million. So not only does this show that institutional investors are pulling out of long positions, they continue to reduce short exposure too. This could indicate that they expect the market prices to remain muted for a while after this.
BTC continues to trend low | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Another part of the market that also saw outflows was the digital investment products. The prior week, the outflows had been $17 million. Last week, they came out to a total of $9 billion.
Inflows In Unlikely Places
Ethereum has not been a favorite of institutional investors for a while now. The altcoin had borne the brunt of its bearishness for the longest time, leading to months of consecutive outflows. However, things seem to be looking up for the digital asset.
The last week saw inflows come into Ethereum totaling $3 million for this time. This follows the announcement that the Merge would be happening in September, turning the market sentiment in favor of the digital asset once more.
Altcoins seemed to be the only ones receiving any sort of inflows for last week too. Although their volumes came out not very encouraging, there were still inflows nonetheless. Assets like Cardano saw inflows of $0.5, presumably following the renewed bullishness in Ethereum. However, Solana did not see any favor from institutional investors with outflows of $1.4 million.
With the majority of outflows coming from the US, Germany, and Sweden, blockchain equities recorded outflows of $1.6 million for the same time period.
Featured image from U.S. Gloabl Investors, chart from TradingView.com
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