Whales continue to stockpile BTC despite Bitcoin pulling back from all-time highs.
Institutional entities continue to accumulate Bitcoin despite the recent market volatility.
BTC tagged a low of $61,500 earlier today, marking a 16.4% retracement from last week’s all-time high of around $73,580, according to CoinGecko. Bitcoin has since rebounded to $63,122, with BTC down 13.5% in seven days.
Bitcoin traded lower on exchanges suffering from thin liquidity, with BTC wicking down to a violent low of $8,900 on BitMEX’s spot markets. The move was driven by market sell orders worth 400 BTC, with BitMEX stating it is investigating “unusual activity” involving large sell orders on its BTC/USDT spot market.
According to James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, spot Bitcoin ETFs posted an outflow of $154.4 million on March 18, marking only the second daily outflow during March so far. The milestone was driven by a record $642.5 million exiting the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
However, many large investors are unperturbed by Bitcoin’s recent volatility.
In a March 18 interview with Bloomberg, Grant Engelbart, the vice president and investment strategist at Carson Group, a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) network accounting for $30 billion in assets, said RIAs investing in spot Bitcoin ETFs are allocating 3.5% of client portfolios on average.
Carson onboarded support for four Bitcoin ETFs roughly four weeks ago.
On March 19, Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest pension fund with $1.5 trillion in assets under management, said it is exploring Bitcoin among other previously untouched asset classes as part of plans to develop new and diversified long-term investment strategies.
The five-year research initiative will also look into gold, forests, and farmland, among other assets. Last month, Japan’s cabinet approved a bill proposing legislative amendments allow investment firms to hold crypto assets.
MicroStrategy, a mobile software and business intelligence firm, announced it purchased an additional 9,245 Bitcoin on March 19, bringing its holdings to 214,246 BTC. MicroStrategy’s BTC stash now accounts for 1.09% of Bitcoin’s supply worth $13.5 billion, equating to an unrealized profit of nearly $6 billion at an average purchase price of $35.160 each.
Institutional entities aren’t the only ones buying Bitcoin, with a March 19 report from Bloomberg indicating surging demand for BTC from Argentinians amid soaring annual inflation exceeding 250% and economic shock therapy policies.
Start for free
Bloomberg noted trade volume on Lemon, the country’s leading digital asset exchange, tagging a 20-month high during the week of March 10. The platform hosted nearly 35,000 Bitcoin purchases, double the weekly average during 2023. Bloomberg said similar trends can be observed on Ripio and Belo, rival cryptocurrency exchanges servicing the Argentinian market.
Manuel Beaudroit, the CEO of Belo, added that stablecoin purchases have dropped 14% over the same period.
The Argentinian plight against inflation has long served as evidence demonstrating the utility of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, with local adoption gaining traction in response to fiscal austerity introduced back in 2012.
Credit: Source link
