Crypto may have institutionalized, but it still trades like a rumor mill

When Strategy sold a tiny 32 Bitcoin for the first time since 2022, the market treated it as the top. But a single balance-sheet decision is not necessarily reflecting long-term demand data. The subsequent much larger sale of bitcoin by Strategy was digested more as treasury management than capitulation, interpreting the step as Strategy evolving its long-term treasury strategy from passively HODLing collateral to actively managing it over time. The market initially spent its energy reacting to a press release while the real long-term relevant picture was being written somewhere it was not looking at directly.

Fabian Dori is Chief Investment Officer at Sygnum Bank.

When spot Bitcoin ETFs had their worst month on record for outflows, the coverage read like a wake. Yet at the very same time, long-term holders, the wallets that have held through previous cycles and rarely sell, started buying again, adding into the weakness. The cohort with the best record of timing entries was doing the exact opposite of the institutional money that was selling. The headline audience saw capitulation. The positioning audience saw something closer to opportunity. They were looking at the same market.

Derivatives told the same story earlier in the year. One of the clearest, least ambiguous signals I track is simple: of the 50 largest perpetual futures contracts, how many carry a positive funding rate, the recurring fee traders pay to keep a position open. When that fee is positive, it is the bulls paying to stay long; when it is negative, the bears are paying to stay short. Bitcoin’s funding rate stayed negative for its longest stretch since the aftermath of FTX, yet a meaningful share of those top 50 contracts had quietly flipped positive. Risk appetite was turning up before the price confirmed it. The headline was still “record short streak.” The positioning was already less bearish.