Bitcoin Institutional Behavior Reverses As Demand Metric Turns Red

The founder of Capriole Investments has highlighted how institutions have reversed course on Bitcoin recently, taking to selling once more.

Bitcoin Has Seen Institutional Demand Turn Red Recently

In a new post on X, Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards has discussed the latest trend in the institutional demand for Bitcoin. The indicator cited by Edwards is the “Net Institutional Buying,” which gauges the net trend of institutions in the BTC market.

As a proxy for institutions, the metric makes use of the data of the spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and digital-asset treasury (DAT) companies. The spot ETFs are investment vehicles that allow investors to gain indirect exposure to Bitcoin. These funds hold and custody BTC on behalf of their investors. Similarly, DAT firms also provide their traders with exposure to the cryptocurrency’s price by holding BTC on their balance sheets.

As both of these represent a regulated off-chain route into digital assets, they tend to be the preferred mode of investment for the more traditional traders like institutions.

Now, here is the chart shared by the analyst that shows the trend in the Net Institutional Buying for Bitcoin over the last couple of years:

As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin Net Institutional Buying rose to a positive level during March and stayed there until very recently, indicating that demand from massive entities was pouring into the cryptocurrency.

The trend has changed, however, and the metric is now back inside the negative territory. “Institutions are once again dumping on us,” noted Edwards. The indicator’s decline has primarily been driven by the United States spot ETFs, which have observed a shift toward net outflows since the May 12th Consumer Price Index (CPI) report.

The report showed that the CPI rose to 3.8% in April, which is the highest level seen in the US since May 2023. The high inflation rate could be why big-money entities have been pulling out of risk assets like Bitcoin.

It now remains to be seen how long the Net Institutional Buying will remain negative for. “Hard to get meaningful price improvement while this metric is in the red,” explained the analyst.

In some other news, there are currently 7.75 million tokens held at a net unrealized loss on the Bitcoin network, as on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has pointed out in an X post.

This level is lower than the highs seen after the February crash, but still notably elevated compared to last year’s figures. “This supply overhang is a structural feature of bear markets, typically resolved only as weaker hands capitulate,” said Glassnode.

BTC Price

Bitcoin has overall moved sideways over the last few days as its price is still floating around $77,300.