Crypto Market to Stay Highly Correlated to Stocks Amid Macro Events and Dwindling Network Activities, Citi Says

• Crypto market expected to remain highly correlated to stocks, the report said.

• The bank noted that network activity has been falling on Ethereum and stalling on the Bitcoin blockchain.

• Both bitcoin and ether spot ETFs have seen outflows, the bank said.

The cryptocurrency market has continued to underperform other risk assets amid weakening demand, and is expected to stay highly correlated with equities, Citi (C) said in a research report on Friday.

The bank noted that both bitcoin and ether (ETH) spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have seen outflows.

“ETFs have seen net outflows, layer 1 activity has fallen or stagnated and funding rates remain very low,” analysts led by David Glass wrote. Funding rates are the difference between price of the perpetual futures and the spot price of digital assets. A positive funding rate indicates that perpetuals are trading at a premium to the spot price, indicating increased demand for bullish bets.

Looking forward, the bank said it expects the crypto market to remain highly correlated with equities amid the upcoming macro calendar, which kicks off with today’s Nonfarm Payrolls report.

Recent weakness in digital assets has resulted in lower energy consumption by bitcoin (BTC) miners and “weaker production cost model outputs,” the report said.

Meanwhile, the market cap for stablecoin continue to grow, shrugging off the recent market weakness, the bank said.

The Bitcoin hashrate, a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty, is now at the upper end of its recent range, the report noted. Hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain.

Activity has also been trending lower on the Ethereum blockchain, and stalling on the Bitcoin network, the report added.

Rival Wall Street bank JPMorgan expressed similar sentiment in a report on Friday. It said the crypto ecosystem lacks major catalysts in the near-term and digital assets are likely to be more sensitive to macro factors.