Crypto ETFs lose $1.53B as Bitcoin leads another week of withdrawals

Spot Bitcoin ETFs began trading in the U.S. in January 2024, followed by Ether funds in mid-2024, with Solana, Hyperliquid and Zcash products arriving this year as a newer frontier. Farside Investors and SoSoValue have tracked their daily flows ever since, turning weekly inflow or outflow totals into a proxy for institutional appetite. Outflows had already run for a prior week before this one, with Bitcoin funds alone shedding roughly a billion dollars twice in a row.

Fund issuers such as BlackRock and Fidelity now face redemptions that return cash to authorized participants, who must sell the underlying coins to balance the trust. Advisors steering client money into these wrappers see a second week of net selling, not buying, making the products harder to pitch as a one-way institutional on-ramp. Avalanche's $227,000 inflow, the only green figure among fifteen categories, shows how selective the remaining demand has become, leaving most issuers managing withdrawals rather than growth.

The episode tests how much of the ETF story was genuine allocation versus short-term positioning dressed up as adoption. A fund wrapper only proves durable demand when it keeps attracting money through drawdowns, not just during them; five straight categories losing assets in the same week argues for caution about reading these vehicles as a settled verdict on institutional interest. The single exception, a small one, is not enough to contradict that. (per crypto.news)

Whether Bitcoin ETFs post a third straight week of roughly a billion dollars in redemptions, as tracked by Farside Investors and SoSoValue, will show if the selling is becoming a trend rather than a blip. A reversal, or a widening of inflows beyond Avalanche's $227,000 across more of the fifteen tracked categories, would mark the first sign that institutional allocators are stepping back in rather than out.