JPMorgan: Bitcoin investment from retail and institutional investors balance out
According to a report from investment bank, JPMorgan, institutional and retail bitcoin flows balanced out in Q1 2021.
The banking giant kept track of retail Bitcoin flows going through Square and PayPal. Institutional flows were monitored via CME Group’s bitcoin futures market. While retail investors accumulated 187,000 Bitcoin in Q1, institutional investors purchased around 173,000 units of the leading digital asset.
Comparatively, retail investors acquired 205,000 BTC last quarter while institutional players bought nearly 307,000. JPMorgan explained:
[Retail] saw a big acceleration in the current quarter relative to the previous quarter while the institutional flow was flattish… In other words, in bitcoin terms, while the bitcoin flow picture was dominated by institutional investors during Q4 2020, the flow picture has been more equally balanced between retail and institutional investors in the current quarter echoing Q3 2020.
For clarity, the firm did not cover flows from other sources such as exchanges. In this case, JPMorgan defines its “flow” as purchases made via PayPal and Square for retail investors and CME’s Bitcoin futures for institutions.
According to the data shared by JPMorgan, itBit daily volumes nearly doubled between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. itBit is PayPal’s crypto provider. The same applies to Bitcoin transactions on Square. Meanwhile, the activity from the CME Group increased slightly from 1,284 to 1,449.
