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Spot Bitcoin ETFs Suffer Worst Week Yet With $890 Million In Outflows – The Defiant

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Heavy GBTC sales drove five straight days of outflows.

Last week hosted record outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, with inflows to newly launched funds failing to offset heavy outflows from the recently converted Grayscale Bitcoin Trust amid heavy selling from Gemini.

According to data from Soso Value, spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $889.75 million worth of assets during an unprecedented five consecutive days of outflows from March 18 through March 22. March 19 hosted a record outflow of $326.2 million, with outflows steadily declining down to $51.6 million on March 22.

The milestone follows a volatile week for Bitcoin and the broader crypto markets, with BTC sinking 8.5% from $68,500 to a low of $62,700 over the same period.

However, James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, attributed the bearish spot Bitcoin ETF flows to Gemini Earn offloading more than $2 billion worth of GBTC shares.

The assets were previously provided as loan collateral by Genesis, the insolvent centralized lending platform, securing assets borrowed from Gemini Earn users. Gemini was granted permission to offload the shares by a U.S. court on Feb. 17.

“Outflows were likely related to bankruptcy,” Seyffart said. “They were mostly Gemini/Genesis selling.”

Data shared by Seyffart indicates that roughly $2 billion left the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust last week, with the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF also hosting a modest outflow of $1.5 billion. BlackRock’s iShares posted $828.3 million worth of inflows despite the bearish market momentum, followed by Fidelity’s Bitcoin ETF with $79.3 million.

A recent blog post from Glassnode, an on-chain analytics firm, asserted that the market dynamics of spot Bitcoin ETFs could overshadow the impact of Bitcoin’s upcoming fourth quadrennial halving event.

“As Bitcoin approaches its halving, the significant buying power of ETFs is set to overshadow the traditional supply squeeze effect expected from the halving,” Glassnode said. “This dynamic introduces a need for traders to balance the historical impact of halvings with the contemporary influence of ETFs on Bitcoin’s availability and price.”

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