By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bitcoin funds and products posted record outflows last week as investors continued to cast a cautious eye on the world's largest cryptocurrency, which has seen its upward momentum stall in the last few months, according to digital currency manager CoinShares data released on Monday.
Bitcoin outflows hit $141 million in the week ending June 4, representing 8.3% of the net inflows seen this year. For the year so far, Bitcoin still showed net inflows of $4.2 billion.
The cryptocurrency sector overall suffered outflows of $94.2 million last week, the data showed.
James Butterfill, investment strategist at CoinShares, believes that despite the outflows last week, there seems to be “an early turn in sentiment since May, where most product providers were seeing net outflows and sentiment was broadly negative.”
Bitcoin was last down 0.6% at $35,591. For the month of May, bitcoin dropped 35.4%. So far in June, bitcoin was down a modest 4.8%.
That said, ether, the token used for the Ethereum blockchain, continued to see inflows, with $33 million this week. So far this year, inflows into ether products and funds totalled $1 billion.
XRP saw total inflows of $7 million, the largest since April, while both Cardano and multi-asset products posted inflows of $4.5 million and $2.7 million respectively.
Digital asset product weekly trading volume on bitcoin has fallen 62% compared with last month, CoinShares data showed.
Blockchain data provider Glassnode also affirmed bitcoin's slowdown.
“The growth in on-chain demand has slowed markedly, with a number of on-chain metrics showing significant pull-backs,” Glassnode said.
During the recent sell-off, the bitcoin network experienced a reduction in active addresses, down 18% from the recent highs to around 940,000, Glassnode said. This fall though was roughly half the reduction seen in 2017, suggesting that while activity has slowed, more demand exists than after the previous cycle's macro top.
Data also showed that Grayscale remains the largest digital currency manager at $30.3 billion, but that was down from $33.6 billion, the previous week.
CoinShares, the second-biggest and largest European digital asset manager, oversaw nearly $4 billion on assets, little changed from last week.
(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
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