(Kitco News) - With equity markets in the United States closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, most cryptocurrencies traded lower on thin volume after the tumultuous end to last week, which saw the first batch of Bitcoin ETFs finally approved on Thursday, pushing crypto prices higher, followed by a broad pullback on Friday.
Bitcoin (BTC) still managed to post a positive performance to begin the third week of the new year. Data provided by TradingView shows that Bitcoin traded in the mid-42,000s throughout most of the overnight, but declined to $42,169 at around 10 am EST before the bulls managed to push it to a daily high of $43,306.91 shortly before 2 pm EST.
At the time of writing, the top cryptocurrency was trading at $42,766.79 for a gain of over 2.5% on the session.
Flows explode, but sentiment shifts to neutral
Thursday’s launch of the first U.S. spot BTC ETFs also led to a massive surge in inflows into digital asset investment products, according to the latest data provided by CoinShares. Total assets under management (AuM) for globally listed products increased by $1.18 billion during the second week of January, continuing the trend of inflows seen at the end of 2023.
The United States dominated in terms of investments made by exchange countries, accounting for $1.24 billion of total inflows, with Switzerland also adding $21 million.
“We suspect the outflows seen in Europe & Canada (Canada US$44m, Germany US$27m & Sweden US$16m) were basis traders looking to switch from Europe to the US,” said James Butterfill, CoinShares head of research.
“Bitcoin saw US$1.16bn inflows last week, representing a significant 3% of total assets under management (AuM),” Butterfill said, “while short-bitcoin also saw minor inflows totaling US$4.1m.”
Ethereum also managed to extend its streak of inflows to 10 weeks with an increase of $26 million last week, while XRP also saw $2.2 million. “Solana was the notable exception, seeing only US$0.5m inflows last week,” Butterfill said.
Blockchain equities also saw large inflows last week, adding $98 million to the previous week’s $24 million and bringing total inflows over the last 7 weeks to $608 million, according to the report.
Data provided by Alternative shows that sentiment in the crypto market has now switched to “Neutral” after remaining in “Greed” territory since October 24, its longest streak since November 2021, near the end of the previous bull market.
Altcoins in the red
Most of the tokens in the top 200 recorded losses on Monday amid the lower-than-usual holiday volume, but there were still a number of standout performers.
Flare (FLR) was the biggest gainer, with an increase of 33.61%, followed by a 13.66% gain for Blur (BLUR), and a 9.74% increase for Sui (SUI). The Solana-based meme token Bonk (BONK) was the biggest loser once again, posting a decline of 5.26%, while Kaspa (KAS) fell 2.62%, and Arweave (AR) sank 2.46%.
The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $1.68 trillion, and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 49.9%.
