1.41pm: Digital asset funds post bullish week
Bitcoin investors are leading the surge in digital asset find inflows, with another bullish week seeing US$125mln (£99mln) flowing into investment funds provided by CoinShares, 21Shares, ProShares and other major digital asset fund managers.
According to data provided by CoinShares, bitcoin funds inflows totalled US$123mln for the week ended June 30, bringing month-to-date inflows to US$284.2mln.
Ethereum investment products were a distant second last week with US$2.7mln of inflow, while MTD volumes remain in the negative territory at -US$29.7mln.
Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP) and Cardano (ADA) saw negligible inflows.
The recent surge in bitcoin investments comes off the back of BlackRock’s application for a spot ETF in the US. Though, with the regulator shooting the application down, it was be interesting to see the rate of inflows for this coming week.
“Bitcoin investment products are now back to a net inflow year-to-date having been in a net outflow position of US$171m just 2 weeks ago,” noted CoinShares.
On the spot market, bitcoin is currently trading at US$30,622, practically unchanged from the day before.
10.55am: Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash lead altcoin space
Litcoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) remain the top movers in the altcoin space, having surged 26% and 52% in the past week respectively.
It is no coincidence that these two prominent bitcoin hard forks are the strongest altcoins: Both were made available on new institutionally backed cryptocurrency exchange EDX.
Alongside the original bitcoin and second-largest cryptocurrency ether (ETH), LTC and BCH has been given greater exposure to institutional investors through their EDX listings.
In the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, lending protocol Compound (COMP) it top of the pile, having clocked in 15% of gains overnight to bring its market capitalisation close to US$5.7bn.
Global cryptocurrency market cap currently stands at US$1.21tn, with total value locked in the DeFi space currently at US$46.6bn.
9.30am: Ethereum outpaces bitcoin on the spot market
Hopes for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) took a slight hit over the weekend after Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), called BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s applications “inadequate”.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Gensler has reservations about how these Big Money titans will manage surveillance-sharing agreements.
Given that mass institutional interest in bitcoin in recent weeks has been the main catalyst for bitcoin’s impressive bull run above US$30,000, it would have been reasonable to see a fall in spot prices as sentiment soured.
Yet, despite some pretty wild volatility on Friday, the BTC/USDT pair remains in a strong position at US$30,600, having only briefly dipped below the 30k support line over the weekend.
Can bitcoin break above 31k again? – Source: currency.com
The pair appears to be trading sideways between 30k and 31k, where the majority of price action has occurred for the past 10 days.
In fact, bitcoin sentiment appears strong by most metrics, Note that Gensler did not flatly rule out a spot bitcoin ETF, which would open bitcoin to billions of dollars of new investor money.
According to the Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index, investor sentiment is very much in the bullish category.
This could be down to the diplomatic tone coming from the SEC; BlackRock is likely to try again with Gensler’s stipulations in mind.
Open interest in bitcoin futures has taken a hit though, falling from US$10.4bn at the tail end of last week to US$9.7bn today.
With a few headwinds blowing across bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH) has steered ahead, with the ETH/USDT pair surging to US$1,960 following a bullish weekend.
Week on week, ETH is up nearly 4% while BTC is up less than one percent.