Bitcoin and Ether Slide as Spot Bitcoin ETFs See Record Outflows

Bitcoin price reached its lowest level in the past two weeks, dropping by 5.18% in the last 24 hours to trade at $61,380 as of 1:50 p.m. Hong Kong time, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Meanwhile, Ether fell by 7.8% to $3,090.

The recent decline in the two largest cryptocurrencies has brought them back to their value from the last week of February. Additionally, all other top 10 non-stablecoin crypto tokens by market capitalization also experienced declines on Wednesday in Asia.

This drop in prices coincided with significant outflows from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). On Tuesday, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs saw $326.2 million in outflows, marking the largest outflow since their debut. Notably, GBTC alone witnessed $444 million exiting the fund, while other ETFs experienced weaker inflows, as per data from Farside.

Move to Solana

In addition to the ETF outflows, Rachael Lucas, BTC Markets’ Head of Marketing and Communications, mentioned that speculative shifts towards smaller coins like SOL and AVAX, along with meme coins like WIF, have contributed to the drop in bitcoin’s price.

Driven by a $700,000 advertisement on the Vegas sphere, Memecoins on Solana such as dogwifhat and Slerf have garnered significant attention, leading to record-high on-chain volumes and fees on the network.

Economist Alex Krüger also expressed concerns about the Solana mania, stating that it “went too far,” and highlighting the excessive leverage in the crypto market as a contributing factor to the decline.

“Ethereum’s price is tied to Bitcoin ‘s, while delays in SEC decisions on proposed Ether ETFs by Hashdex and ARK 21Shares increase uncertainty, and Grayscale considers adding staking to its Ether ETF application,” added BTC Markets’ Lucas.

Over the past 24 hours, the global cryptocurrency market capitalization fell by 4.5% to $2.42 trillion, according to data from CoinGecko.