Institutional investors have moved their bets away from leading cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) and into three major altcoins: Cardano’s $ADA, Solana ($SOL), and $XRP amid a wider cryptocurrency market rout.
As the total market capitalization of all cryptoassets drops below the $1 trillion mark for the first time since early 2021, CoinShares’ Digital Asset Fund Flows report shows that institutional investors largely moved away from the cryptocurrency space while increasing their bets on the three altcoins mentioned above.
According to the report, digital asset investment product flows “remain choppy in anticipation of hawkish monetary policy” and steady daily outflows have led to weekly outflows totaling $102 million, with BTC investment products seeing $57 million in outflows last week.
The report notes that what pushed BTC into a “crypto winter” can “by and large be explained as a direct result of an increasingly hawkish rhetoric from the US Federal Reserve.” The majority of outflows, CoinShares’ report details, were in the Americas, totaling $98 million. In Europe, outflows totaled $2 million.
Despite these outflows, products shorting the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin also saw outflows of $200,000, showing institutional investors are presumably backing out of the crypto market instead of betting against it. Total assets under management for short BTC products remain at around $55 million, compared to $27 billion for products longing BTC.
Ethereum also saw outflows of $41 million, bringing its total outflows year-to-date to $387 million. In contrast, its competitor ADA saw inflows of $200,000, as did the native token of the XRP Ledger, XRP.
Solana seemingly led the market last week for institutional bets, seeing inflows of $400,000, which brought its year-to-date flows to $108 million, far above Cardano’s $9.4 million and XRP’s $6 million.
As CryptoGlobe reported, ADA has been outperforming Ethereum over the last few weeks and is already up over 88% against it after making a recent low. Cardano’s performance is significant as it rivals Ethereum as a blockchain network that runs smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), As reported, over 5 million native assets have now been minted on top of the Cardano blockchain, doubling the figure seen at the end of last year. Over 1,000 projects are building on top of the network,
It’s worth noting Cardano’s price has been rising ahead of the Vasil hard fork, which according to Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson is expected to bring a “massive performance improvement.” The crypto community has recently predicted that the price of Cardano’s native $ADA token will surpass the $1 mark by the end of June, after the implementation of the fork.
The Vasil hard fork is a major upgrade that will involve four Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs).
The hard fork has already seen ADA outperform numerous other cryptocurrencies, even amid a wider cryptocurrency market downturn exacerbated by the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. That performance saw ADA become the sixth-largest cryptoasset by market capitalization this week, surpassing XRP.
Meanwhile, Solana has significantly underperformed over a number of outages so far this year. XRP itself has been held back y a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Ripple.
A panel of cryptocurrency industry experts has predicted that the price of XRP will hit $2.55 by the end of the year, and sees it go as high as $3.61 by the end of 2025, and $4.98 by the end of 2030.
The panel’s prediction is based on Ripple having a positive outcome in its case against the SEC. Should Ripple lose, the panel sees XRP’s value drop to $0.68.
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