Global crypto assets report $500 million in weekly outflows

Global crypto funds saw about $500 million in outflows last week, the most since the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved spot Bitcoin ETFs on Jan. 10, according to a CoinShares report.

Grayscale Investments’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (GBTC), which converted from a trust following the SEC’s decision, led the outflows with $2.2 billion last week. That brings its total outflow since conversion to just over $5 billion as of Jan. 26, according to the report.

The fund’s 1.5% management fee — the highest of any of the spot Bitcoin ETFs on the market — is partially responsible for recent outflows. Other short-term factors include such as FTX’s sale of at least $600 million in GBTC shares and profit-taking from investors who took advantage of the fund’s discount in recent years, according to Kaiko Research.

GBTC saw $255 million in outflows Friday, which marked the first net-positive day of flows for US-based Bitcoin ETFs, including GBTC, in a week, with $15 million in inflows across the 10 funds, according to a report from JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“As we’ve been seeing transaction volumes slowing this past week, we think we are perhaps seeing indication of the hype around these ETFs abating and entering a perhaps more normalized flow environment,” analysts at JPMorgan wrote in the report.