The CEO of on-chain data firm CryptoQuant, Ki Young Ju, has revealed that institutional investors dominated the cryptocurrency space’s trading volume in the first quarter of this year, based on on-chain data and data from Coinbase’s shareholder letter.

In a tweet, Ki Young Ju noted that 76% of trading volume in the first quarter of the year on Coinbase came from institutional investors, meaning retail traders represented a fraction of the total volume during the first few months of the year.

The CEO of CryptoQuant added that data from the letter appears to show retail investors are “leaving the crypto market” as in the first quarter of the year retail trading volume of t exchange was around $74 billion, down from $177 billion in Q4 2021, Institutional volume also dropped quarter-on-quarter, however, from $371 billion to $235 billion.

According to Ki Young Ju, as Daily Hodl reports, institutional investors have likely been buying cryptoassets from market makers after the collapse of the Terraform Labs ecosystem, which saw $LUNA drop from a top-10 cryptoasset to nearly being worthless after UST lost its peg to the value of the U.S. dollar.

Notably, the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), a non-profit organization set up to support the Terra ecosystem, deployed its BTC reserves to defend the UST peg earlier this month, allocating it to market makers that seemingly used it to buy the stablecoin.

The organization ultimately failed to bring back UST’s peg with its reserves with the rest now expected to be distributed to the UST wallets that had the smallest holdings before the collapse.

As CryptoGlobe reported, retail investors have been taking advantage of the flagship cryptocurrency’s recent dip towards the $30,000 mark to accumulate more BTC even at a time in which over 40,000 coins worth over $1.16 billion have moved to exchanges.

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