Institutional investors – the richest investors on earth – are selling Bitcoin for the fourth week in a row, according to CoinShares data. That is, they sell more than they buy. Bitcoin saw a total of $38 million in outflows from institutional investors’ funds in the past week.
What is going on?
Preparing for a recession
It may just be that institutional investors are following the example of Warren Buffet, who dumped more than $ 13 billion in shares in preparation for a possible recession. Central bank rate hikes will soon take their toll, Buffet said.
That’s why the investment legend turned to cash, which is usually king at the start of a recession. After all, everyone has to pay the bills with it. Now we see institutional investors behaving in much the same way when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto.
Bitcoin has already seen an outflow of $160 million from institutional investor funds over the past four weeks. The total for all assets – which includes altcoins – is an outflow of $ 200 million. That amount represents about 0.6 percent of all assets held in the funds.
Inflow at Ethereum
While the millions flowed out with Bitcoin, Ethereum had the opposite flow. While not a huge amount, the Ethereum funds actually saw an inflow of $0.1 million. However, these are not the amounts that can influence the price of the asset itself.
The market for institutional investors is still small anyway when you look at these figures. Bitcoin has a market cap of over 500 billion dollars and we are talking about outflows of a few million. These are amounts that do not just move the price.
Although liquidity is currently thinner on the market. That means volumes are low and order books are empty. In theory, this allows smaller amounts of capital to move the market more than usual.