19,200 Bitcoin in one day: what's behind GBTC's outflow?

GBTC, Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF, is experiencing massive outflows. How this has come about and why the trend could soon be over.

Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF is currently experiencing tremendous selling pressure. On the trading day of Jan. 24 alone streamed nearly 19,200 Bitcoin (about $770 million) from GBTC to Coinbase.

But not all transactions can be categorized as outflows, explains analytics platform Arkham on X (formerly Twitter).

"The outflow is split between Coinbase Prime and new GBTC custody addresses. This means that not all BTC is being paid out. It also appears to be settlements of trading activity from previous days."

According to Arkham, "only" 75 percent of the outflows (about 14,400 BTC) are actual payouts.

However, data on Bitcoin outflows vary widely. The data service of the crypto exchange Bitmex speaks for example of a volume of $425 million. Eric Balchunas referred also to this figure. However, the Bloomberg analyst believes the sales trend is slowly coming to an end.

For some market observers, the sell-off of GBTC is one of the reasons for the decline in Bitcoin's price. The cryptocurrency has fallen nearly 18 percent since ETFs began trading. The market capitalization lost more than $115 billion during this period.

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju addresses this statement on X against. According to him, Bitcoin's price loss is due to a sell-off in the derivatives markets. Although there is a lot of over-the-counter activity, this is not reflected in the price, according to Ki.

Overall, however, trading in the remaining Bitcoin ETFs has been excellent. With the exception of Grayscale, volumes are growing from providers around BlackRock and Co. Many investors were actually counting on ETFs as a price catalyst. However, the financial products have so far failed to fulfill this task.