Investors Change Course and Pull Money Out of Bitcoin Funds—But Likely Remain Bullish

After weeks of consecutive inflows, big investors are now pulling money out of crypto funds. 

Investors last week pulled out $6.5 million from investment products, digital asset manager CoinShares said Monday. This came after four weeks of solid inflows totaling $742 million. 

The cash—most of which was focused on Bitcoin—flowed out of large funds designed for accredited investors like Grayscale, 3iQ, and 21 Shares. In total, $13 million was pulled out of Bitcoin investment products. 

At the time of writing, the price of the largest cryptocurrency by market cap was trading for $29,060, down nearly 3% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. 

But things balanced out, CoinShares observed, because investors did plug a total of $6.6 million into Ethereum funds, “suggesting sentiment, which has been poor this year, is slowly beginning to turn around,” according to CoinShares. 

Head of research at CoinShares James Butterfill told Decrypt that not “too much can be gleaned from such a small number,” and highlighted that investors specifically pulled money out of short Bitcoin investment products for the 13th consecutive week, suggesting that investors were still bullish. 

Institutional investors have been flooding into the market this year. Last week, investment funds experienced the most substantial run of inflows since the final quarter of 2021. 

Renewed interest in the space comes as a number of high-profile asset managers try to get the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to approve a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF)—including the world’s biggest firms, BlackRock.