James Butterfill, Investment Strategist at London-based CoinShares, a digital asset manager focused on expanding access to the cryptocurrency ecosystem while serving as a “trusted partner” for its clients, notes that for the week ending March 18, 2022, there were outflows that continued “with $47 million, negative sentiment focused on North America.”
Digital asset investment products “saw outflows for the second consecutive week, totalling US$47m last week.”
The CoinShares team also mentioned that the same trend “continued with outflows predominantly coming from North American providers, with outflows comprising 98% while flows in Europe were broadly flat.”
CoinShares added that they believe the recent negative sentiment in North America “is due to continued jitters over regulation and geopolitical issues caused by the Ukrainian conflict.”
Since the conflict began, they have “seen trading volumes rise by 160% and 150% in Ukraine and Russia respectively.”
The report also mentioned that Bitcoin saw the largest outflows, “totaling US$33m, half the amount seen the previous week.”
This last two weeks of outflows “now total US$101m but year-to-date flows remain positive at $64 million,” the report revealed. The update from CoinShares added that Ethereum “saw outflows totaling $17 million last week, much less than the previous week which saw outflows of US$50m.” The report further noted that the negative sentiment still “pervades the asset this year, with year-to-date outflows at US$151m, representing 1.2% of assets under management (AuM).”
In contrast, most other altcoins “saw inflows last week.”
Notable were XRP, Polkadot and Solana “with inflows totaling US$1.1m, US$0.8m and US$0.7m respectively.”
As covered recently, Townsend Lansing, Head of Product at CoinShares and Nick du Cros, the Head of Compliance and Regulatory affairs at CoinShares, have noted that there appears to have been “quite a bit of confusion” in the digital assets community recently regarding the proposals in the EU Parliament’s draft legislative text for the proposed EU Markets in Crypto Assets regulation (MiCA).
The community was “particularly concerned about language from the Green Party (supported by the Social Democrats) proposing a ban on proof of work protocols under MiCA,” the update from CoinShares noted.