Bearish sentiment toward Bitcoin among institutional investors has been gaining ground in recent months. This was propelled even further by the crash that rocked the digital asset back in mid-June. Since then, bitcoin has struggled to keep its head above the $20,000 level, and as it continues to fail, bearish sentiment has grown rampant. This is evident in the short bitcoin inflows that were recorded for last week.
Record Numbers For Short Bitcoin
The latest CoinShares report has shown that institutional investors are only investing in bitcoin for the short term, and what’s more, they believe that the digital asset is set to decline more. It shows that inflows into the short bitcoin ETFs had hit their highest point since its inception with $51 million for the previous week.
The ProShares short BTC ETF is the latest in line for these types, and while it had seen significant inflows for the prior week, it was chalked up to the fact that the ETF had just launched. However, last week has put into perspective how institutional investors are viewing bitcoin going forward.
To put this in perspective, while inflows for short bitcoin had come out to $51 million for the 7-day period, bitcoin had only recorded $0.6 million in inflows. The digital asset had narrowly missed recording another week of outflows with one of the lowest inflows ever recorded.
BTC falls to $19,500 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Compared to the prior week’s inflows of $15 million, the inflow into short bitcoin had grown a total of 240%. It is one of the most obvious indicators that institutional investors do not expect the price of bitcoin to recover anytime soon.
Institutional Investors On Altcoins
The bearish sentiment on bitcoin on the part of these institutional investors has been relegated to bitcoin only. The CoinShares report shows that altcoins had seen continued inflows. Ethereum which had suffered almost three months of outflows had recorded its second consecutive week of inflows with a total of $5 million.
Other altcoins such as Solana, Polkadot, and Cardano, all competitors for Ethereum, also recorded inflows. Their figures came out to $1 million, $0.7 million, and $0.6 million respectively for last week. This indicates that institutional investors are forecasting a better future for these assets compared to bitcoin.
The Multi-asset investment products were not left out. A total of $4.4 million flowed into them and it has continued to hold its ground even through the bear market, with only 2 weeks of inflows recorded in the space of six months.
One noteworthy thing is that the bearish sentiment seems to be more prominent in institutional investors in the United States. Other regions had recorded better inflow numbers into long investment products which had come out to $20 million for the week.
The report notes that this may be due to the fact that short bitcoin ETFs had become available in the US for the first time. Hence, investors are rushing to take advantage of the new fund.
