Institutions continue offloading BTC exposure despite price rebound

Investments in institutional Bitcoin (BTC) products have continued to decline this past week.

In its “Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly” report on Monday, CoinShares notes that institutional crypto products have experienced outflows for the third consecutive week, with $28 million exiting the sector during the week ending on Friday. As such, the week saw a 170% increase in outflows compared to the $10.4 million for the previous seven days.

The findings revealed that Bitcoin-based funds saw the largest outflows with $24 million, or 85% of combined outflows from crypto products. Monthly outflows for BTC are now at $49 million, although year-to-date flows remain positive at $4.1 billion. CoinShares stated:

“Last week’s outflows suggest negative sentiment still pervades the asset class despite more recent constructive comments from key industry players.”

Ether (ETH) products also saw outflows of $7.3 million over the week, while multi-asset funds bucked the trend with a net inflow totaling $3.1 million. The report added that multi-asset funds are the only class of crypto investment products that have experienced net inflows for every week of 2021 so far.

Despite the downturn, leading crypto asset manager Grayscale recorded an inflow of $2.5 million for the period. Its latest assets under management bulletin reports total AUM of $33.6 billion as of Tuesday.

Related: Institutional selling of crypto reaches longest streak since February 2018

CoinShares concluded that investment product turnover remains low at $1.7 billion for the week — comprising just 22% of May’s weekly average.

However, CoinShares’ data was recorded before Monday’s bullish market action that saw Bitcoin gain 15% in less than three hours.