Record first quarter for institutional crypto investment products: CoinShares

According to digital asset investment manager CoinShares, the first quarter of 2021 has hit a new record for institutional crypto product inflows.

As reported in the April 6 CoinShares Fund Flows Weekly bulletin, Q1 of this year hit a new record with $4.5 billion in inflows compared with $3.9 billion in the final quarter of 2020.

It added that inflows for the past week recorded, ending on April 2, totaled $106 million helping push the total for the three-month period 11% higher than the previous quarter. The inflow was down on previous weeks, however, as the week ending Mar. 12 recorded a $242 million inflow.

While institutional inflows have slowed, CoinShares believes it is not indicative of a broader slowing trend as quarterly growth rates tend to be varied.

Inflows for the past week have been dominated by $83 million in Bitcoin products, or 78% of the total, and $20 million in Ethereum. Overall volumes for Bitcoin investment products comprise a relatively  small share of 6.7% of the total trading volume for regulated or ‘trusted’ cryptocurrency exchanges.

Assets under management for both active and passive crypto investment products are at an all-time high of $59 billion. Grayscale makes up the lion’s share of this AUM figure with $46 billion, or 78% of the total. The second-largest crypto asset fund is CoinShares itself with $5 billion in assets under management.

The European digital asset investment firm has expanded its institutional products this week with the introduction of a physically-backed Litecoin exchange traded product. The new CoinShares investment product will be initially listed on Switzerland’s regulated crypto exchange, SIX Swiss Exchange.

The Litecoin ETP is the third institutional-grade product the firm has launched in 2021. It follows a physically-backed Bitcoin ETP in January and a similar one for Ethereum in February.

On April 1, Cointelegraph reported that CoinShares had entered a partnership with Canadian investment fund manager 3iQ in order to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in Canada.

3iQ launched Canada’s first institutional Bitcoin fund in April 2020, and it currently has $1.7 billion in assets under management according to the CoinShares report.