Institutional investors shed $133 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) investment products last week, marking the largest week of outflows since June last year.
According to the latest edition of CoinShares’ weekly Digital Asset Fund Flows report, the overall digital asset fund outflows for the week ending April 29 totaled $120.1 million, with the large Bitcoin outflows marginally offset by a surprise $38 million worth of inflows for FTX Token (FTT) products.
The $132.7 million worth of outflows from BTC funds last week, brings the month-to-date outflows for April to $310.8 million.
The last time BTC funds saw this level of outflows in a single week was during a strong bearish trend in June 2021 as a result of major FUD in the news including Tesla halting BTC payments for its cars over environmental concerns and China rolling out its crypto mining ban.
CoinShares noted in the report that there doesn’t appear to be a strong indicator of why a similar level of bearish investment sentiment had resurfaced last month, but did point to a couple of potential factors:
“It is difficult to ascertain the precise reason for this other than the hawkish rhetoric from the US Federal Reserve and the recent price decline.”
Like many other top assets and various stock market indexes, the price of BTC has suffered significantly over the past 30 days, dropping roughly 18.2% to sit at $37,970 at the time of writing. Many onlookers attribute this to fears that inflation and the Federal Reserve’s upcoming interest rate hikes will see the price of BTC tank further.
In a broader view, the overall month-to-date (MTD) outflows for all digital asset products tracked by CoinShares totaled $326.1 million, suggesting that institutional investors have been looking to take risk off the table across the board with crypto investments.
“This doesn’t reflect the same bearishness seen at the beginning of this year, although it is close to the US$467m outflows witnessed. Regionally, the outflows were fairly evenly split between The Americas comprising 41% and Europe 59%,” CoinShares wrote.
Related: 3 reasons why Bitcoin price is clinging to $38,000
Bitcoin’s nearest competitor for the top spot in crypto, Ethereum (ETH) has also suffered from bearish sentiment of late, with products offering exposure to ETH suffering $25 million worth of outflows, and MTD outflows of $82.3 million.
On the other end of the spectrum, funds tied to crypto exchange and NFT platform FTX’s FTT saw $38 million worth of inflows, but as FTT funds are categorized under “other,” it is unclear if this is part of a longer trend. Notably, the price of FTT is down 24.5% over the past 30 days also.
Terra (LUNA) and Fantom (FTM) investment products also saw minor inflows of $390,000 and $250,000 each.