Cardano, Polkadot Gain Institutions’ Attention As ETH, BTC Lose It

Aaryamann Shrivastava

Tue, May 24, 2022, 7:49 PM 2 min read

Key Insights:

Institutional investors seem to have shifted their focus from Bitcoin to altcoins.
This week noted the highest outflows from institutions in more than four months.
The most in-demand assets (ADA, DOT) are also the worst-performing assets.

In the wake of market-wide recovery, or more appropriately, the attempt at recovery, institutional investors’ move has finally come forward, and it is surprisingly not what was expected out of them.

Bitcoin Takes a Back Seat

As per the weekly net flows report from CoinShares, the week ending May 20 noted outflows totaling $141 million, the highest figure observed in more than four months.

The week before, the same institutions registered inflows worth $247 million despite the entire market crashing and losing billions of dollars.

Interestingly, this week brought forward some previously unseen changes. For the most part of this year, Bitcoin was one of the most preferred assets witnessing mostly inflows, while Ethereum took the heat of bearishness.

This week Bitcoin slipped into the same category as Ethereum and marked outflows worth $153.5 million. At the same time, Ethereum only observed $300k in outflows.

While no other asset explicitly noted inflows high enough to take Bitcoin’s place, Polkadot and Cardano were certainly the more preferred cryptocurrencies for institutions to invest in.

Both the assets saw inflows worth $1 million, while their competitors Solana, Litecoin, Ripple, and Tron were in the sub $1 million categories.

However so, Solana still holds the highest value in the altcoin category, even more than the altcoin king Ethereum itself year to date (since January 1, 2022) SOL’s flows have remained net positive at $102 million.

In contrast, Ethereum has observed outflows amounting to $239 million in the same duration.

Are Cardano and Polkdaot Brothers?

Apart from being the highlight of the week, both the assets have also been imitating each other’s price action as from their individual all-time highs to date, ADA and DOT have declined by 84%.

DOT, trading at $10.04 in the span of almost two weeks, has only managed to recover by 17.1% and is still 40% away from its next critical support of $14.04.