Investors Have Stopped Shorting Bitcoin for First Time in 3 Months, Says CoinShares

Institutional investors have stopped betting against Bitcoin, according to CoinShares’ latest fund report.

According to the firm’s head of research James Butterfill, outflows into short Bitcoin (BTC) products have ceased for the first time in fourteen weeks, suggesting that large digital asset funds are taking a different approach to the alpha crypto.

Short products allow investors to profit on an asset, be it a stock or cryptocurrency, dropping in price.

The products listed on Coinshare’s report include Grayscale Investments, notably its flagship GBTC fund, Bitwise’s 10 Crypto Index Fund, ProShares ETF (BITO), among several others.

Shorting generally involves an investor borrowing the asset–in this case, Bitcoin–then selling it on the open market, and buying it back at a lower price, and repaying the loan.

Though today’s report indicates that institutional investors may be dropping their short positions for the time being, they have nonetheless been busy selling. Across the various Bitcoin-related funds, investors have sold more than $111 million this past week.

Butterfill writes that this is the largest weekly outflow since U.S. regulators began their heightened regulatory scrutiny on the industry.

Institutions are hitting pause as the industry navigates several lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance, along with the “unfair” labeling of several tokens as unregistered securities.

Authorities also closed down a few of the banks associated with the digital asset industry, several under rather murky circumstances.

After Bitcoin, altcoins take center stage

On the other hand, however, select altcoins appear to be benefitting from the sell pressure in Bitcoin and Ethereum–although the latter is being sold to a lesser extent.

Solana has seen a notable uptick in buying pressure from institutions in Europe and the United States, clocking its most bullish week since March 2022 at an impressive $9.5 million in inflows.

Ripple (XRP) and Litecoin (LTC) also saw green weeks, although both received less than $1 million in institutional interest.

Most of last week’s selling, according to CoinShares, has been done by Canadian and German funds, with over $70 million and $28 million in outflows, respectively.