Michael Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, believes the crypto space is lackadaisical right now due to low participation from institutional investors.
During an interview with CNBC, the American investor said the market lacks enthusiasm as most of the recent activities in the space are coming from retail buyers while large-scale players are withdrawing.
“Quite frankly, crypto is lackadaisical, I’d say. There’s a constant bid from retail. We’re seeing it through all the platforms, and there’s not a lot of institutional excitement right now and so the dog days of summer started early in crypto. Does it make me thrilled? That’s just the reality,” Novogratz said.
Lack of Enthusiasm From Institutional Investors
Novogratz’s statement resounds a May 31 report from CoinShares on weekly crypto asset flows, which disclosed that digital asset investment products saw outflows of $39 million from institutional investors for the sixth consecutive week, totaling $272 million.
Bitcoin has remained the focus of the outflows, with a total of $11 million, while Ethereum lost $5.9 million in outflows. Algorand, Litecoin, and Uniswap funds also saw outflows of $8 million, $500,000, and $200,000, respectively.
The U.S. led the flows, with Germany and Switzerland following closely behind. Altogether, 0.8% of assets under management left the crypto market last week.
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Adoption Still On the Rise
Despite the declining institutional adoption, Novogratz noted that “interesting” things are still happening in the crypto space. The Galaxy Digital CEO pointed out the growing adoption of cryptocurrencies in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong and China.
The largest Chinese social media app, WeChat, recently enabled Bitcoin price quote indexes in its search queries. The platform’s 1.3 billion users can now access the digital asset’s price quotes despite the current crypto ban in the country.
In addition, Hong Kong now allows retail crypto trading through regulated exchanges. The Hong Kong Virtual Asset Consortium has approved the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap for listing to enable easy reviews and compliance from the exchanges.
“There’s a couple of things that happened today which are pretty interesting. WeChat just enabled Bitcoin and crypto trading on the biggest single platform in the world. That’s a pretty big deal. Hong Kong is officially allowing crypto trading for retail customers through regulated exchanges for the first time, and so we’re seeing Asian adoption,” Novogratz added.
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