Institutional investors poured $300 million into Bitcoin during the Terra’s crash

Investors poured a record amount of $299 million into crypto assets last week, even as the collapse in TerraUSD spurred a broader market sell-off. According to Coinshares, it’s a signal that they saw the market turmoil “as a buying opportunity.”

Leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin was the biggest winner, logging $299 million in weekly inflows, CoinShares said in a report published on May 16.

While outflows for Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, and others weighed on the total, digital asset investment products overall saw $274 million in inflows from May 13. According to the report, that was the highest weekly tally this year, which analyzes institutional digital-asset flows.

That was a “strong signal that investors saw the recent UST stablecoin de-peg and its associated broad sell-off as a buying opportunity,” James Butterfill, investment strategist at CoinShares, said in his report.

The CoinShares report also notes a $27 million outflow from Ethereum exchange-traded funds last week, bringing the total outflow for 2022 to $236 million. That’s 2.6% of assets under management in Ethereum-based funds, Butterfill wrote in the report.

“It’s possible it’s merge related,” he said. “Interestingly, Solana has seen substantial inflows year to date, converse to Ethereum. It suggests there is the preference for Solana over ETH.”

Solana did see a net outflow last week of $5.3 million, but it’s still up $103 million for the year.

Of all the exchange-traded crypto funds (ETFs) that CoinShares tracks, Grayscale is still far and away from the biggest provider. According to CoinShares, it manages $26 billion of the $39 billion under management.

As earlier reported, Grayscale launched a European “Future of Finance” ETF and is still awaiting a decision from the SEC on converting its flagship Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into a Bitcoin spot ETF.