Institutional investors increase their crypto holdings for 5th straight week

Cryptocurrency assets held by institutional managers rose for a fifth consecutive week, a sign that market participants had once again flipped bullish on Bitcoin (BTC) and the leading altcoins. 

Investment flows into crypto products totaled $42 million in the week ending on Sept. 19, with Bitcoin funds seeing inflows of $15 million, according to digital asset manager CoinShares. That’s only the third time in 16 weeks that BTC investment products saw positive inflows.

All major assets registered a weekly increase, with investors buying up $6.6 million worth of Ether (ETH) products and $3.7 million worth of multi-asset funds. Investors also allocated $4.8 million towards Solana (SOL), disregarding a denial-of-service disruption earlier this week as a result of network congestion.

In terms of actual products, 21Shares registered the largest weekly inflows at $28 million. The physically-backed crypto exchange-traded product provider now has $1.87 billion in assets under management. Grayscale remains the single largest crypto asset manager, with $43.177 billion in total assets.

Fund managers have been buying up crypto in lockstep with a broad market recovery that began in late July. Crypto markets peaked above $2.2 trillion last week after plunging to around half that amount earlier in mid-July. However, by Monday, all major crypto assets had printed heavy losses as Chinese Evergrande news walloped risk sentiment.

Related: Bitcoin bounce levels extend to $36K with bulls unmoved by 8% BTC price dip

Institutional investors have become important players in the cryptocurrency market, which is a testament to the growing mainstream acceptance of digital assets. Some of crypto’s biggest asset managers told Cointelegraph earlier this year that investing in digital assets no longer carries the same level of career risk as before, which means more financial advisers and wealth managers are likely to enter the market. This was corroborated by a recent poll by London-based crypto fund Nickel Digital Asset Management, which found that most hedge fund executives have already purchased cryptocurrency.