Digital asset investment products or crypto funds saw net outflows for the second consecutive week, totalling $47 million in the week ended 18 March, according to a report by digital asset manager CoinShares.
The selloff continued from the previous week with outflows predominantly coming from North American providers with outflows comprising 98%, while flows in Europe were broadly flat.
“We believe the recent negative sentiment in North America is due to continued jitters over regulation and geopolitical issues caused by the Ukrainian conflict," CoinShares said in a report.
Since the Ukraine-Russia war began, the crypto market has seen trading volumes rise by 160% and 150% in Ukraine and Russia, respectively.
The world’s biggest crypto asset bitcoin saw the largest outflows, totalling $33 million, half the amount seen the previous week. This last two weeks of outflows now total $101 million but year-to-date flows remain positive at $64 million.
The second biggest crypto asset, ethereum saw outflows totalling $17 million last week, much less than the previous week which saw outflows of $50 million.
On Tuesday, bitcoin was trading 2.9% higher at $42,261.88 at around 1.30 pm IST, as per CoinGecko, a digital currency price and data platform. Ether was up by 3.6% at $2,992.09. Both the digital assets are down around 38% from their respective all-time highs due to fears over US Federal Reserve policy tightening and Ukraine-Russia war.
According to CoinShares, negative sentiment still pervades ether this year, with year-to-date outflows at $151 million, representing 1.2% of assets under management (AUM).
In contrast, most other altcoins saw inflows last week. Notable were ripple, polkadot and solana with inflows totalling $1.1 million, $0.8 million and $0.7 million respectively.
In terms of individual crypto fund providers, the world’s biggest digital asset manager, Grayscale had a total AUM of $37.25 billion, followed by CoinShares at $3.73 billion and 3iQ with an AUM of $2.18 billion. The total AUM of crypto fund providers was at $53.70 for the week ended 18 March 2022.
