Outflows from exchange-traded funds tracking Bitcoin's spot price have accelerated as pangs of pessimism hit the crypto market.
Data from UK-based asset manager Farside Investors shows that outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs topped $928.9 million over the past three weeks, since the first trading day in February.
This has coincided with Bitcoin trading within an exceedingly tight range of between $94,000 and $98,000 for most of February.
Speaking at the Consensus 2025 conference in Hong Kong last week, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow argued that recent trading activity looked "very manufactured."
Bitcoin tumbled over the weekend as investors digested news that more than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum and related tokens had been stolen from crypto exchange Bybit.
This breaks records for the biggest crypto hack ever, but the trading platform announced Monday that it had recouped the bulk of the shortfall in its funds through ETH purchases, loans, and whale deposits, and would publish an audited proof of reserves report.
BTC slumped to lows of $93,878 early Monday, and is now trading at a 13% discount from its all-time high of $108,786 set on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, per data from CoinGecko.
Its tepid performance comes despite the S&P 500 closing at a record high 20 times so far this year, with gold prices also at unprecedented levels.
Even Strategy's continued Bitcoin buys have failed to lift the market.
The company—formerly known as MicroStrategy—announced it had acquired another 20,356 BTC on Monday, meaning it now owns just shy of 500,000 coins, or over $47 billion worth.
That followed closely after Strategy sold $2 billion in convertible notes so it could continue adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet.
One month into his second term, hopes that U.S. President Donald Trump would again ignite the crypto market and revitalize the bull run—as he did with his November election win—have fallen well short of the mark.
Bettors on Polymarket say there is now just a 10% chance that he will create a strategic Bitcoin reserve during his first 100 days in office. The White House has rowed back on campaign pledges by saying it is "evaluating" whether to start stockpiling the world's biggest cryptocurrency.
Edited by Stephen Graves