Steady Interest in Bitcoin Keeps Money Flowing Into Crypto Funds

Digital asset investment products attracted $151 million last week, cooling from prior weeks but still at an elevated level, according to CoinShares’ report Monday. Of this amount, bitcoin-focused funds continue to dominate.

The total flows into cryptocurrency funds declined from the fourth straight week, slipping from $174 million last week, according to the report. The amount is still well off the $1.5 billion of inflows notched a few weeks ago when new exchange-traded funds backed by bitcoin futures contracts debuted in the U.S.

Funds focused on bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, gained $98 million, up from $95 million the week before and pushing assets under management (AuM) to a record $56 billion, even though bitcoin’s dominance against alternative coins (altcoins) has waned over the week.

Bitcoin’s long-awaited update, Taproot, went live early Sunday but has so far not caused any dramatic market movements.

Investments into ethereum-focused funds totaled $17 million, with total AUM exceeding $21 billion for the first time.

Meanwhile, solana-focused funds gained $9.8 million, the second-strongest altcoin last week after Cardano’s ADA.

FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said last week the Solana blockchain is better than Ethereum because it “is one of the few currently existing public blockchains that has a really plausible roadmap to scale millions of transactions per second at you know, fractions of a penny per transaction, which is a scale that you need for this.”

Alternative digital assets appeared to show waning investor interest. “Although flows have been positive recently, we have witnessed subdued volumes,” CoinShares said in the report.

Trading volumes in the crypto investment products averaged $750 million daily in the second half of this year versus $960 million in the first half of 2021, according to the report.

ADA-focused funds dominated altcoin inflows with a total of $16 million.

“The inflows are likely being due to increasing positive investor sentiment for ‘world computer’ coins,” the report said. Polkadot (DOT)-focused funds brought in $5.2 million while Ripple’s XRP attracted $3.1 million.