This Week in Bitcoin: Bybit Hack Rocks Market as ETFs Bleed—But Institutions Remain Bullish

Bitcoin will “bore you to a million dollars” was just one of the quotes circulating Crypto Twitter (aka X) this week as traders and influencers in the space bemoaned sideways price action.

The biggest and oldest digital coin barely budged until Friday, when it dipped following a hack of crypto exchange Bybit that resulted in over $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum and related tokens being swiped—the biggest crypto hack ever based on the value of the assets at the time of the incident. On top of that, U.S. inflation concerns prompted a risk asset selloff.

CoinGecko shows that Bitcoin is now priced at $96,750 per coin after having reached as high as $99,262 Friday morning, then plunging under $95,000 after the Bybit hack rocked markets. But over the last seven days, Bitcoin is nearly flat, falling just 0.7%.

Is the bull run over? Maybe not, but the coin is now 11% below the all-time high price of over $108,000 it touched in January.

ETF flows

Investors continued to pull cash out of the new American exchange-traded products, Farside Investors data shows, with money exiting the new funds every day of this week after U.S. markets were closed Monday. Nearly $365 million left the 10 funds on Thursday alone, marking the week’s worst day for flows. The other three days saw between $60-$65 million each in outflows.

Last week, the crypto ETFs lost money after the Federal Reserve hinted that it wasn’t in a hurry to cut interest rates. When new figures drop next week, we’ll again lackluster numbers for the products as American investors take a more cautious approach to speculating with inflation looking like it it’s here to stay—for now.

Institutions still bullish

Still, analysts at investment firm Bernstein think Bitcoin is only going up: They said in a Monday report that investors should be prepared for a further rally in the asset and equities related to it, as “the confluence of adoption by banks, institutional investors, corporates, and eventually sovereigns” pushes the price of the coin higher.

Bernstein analysts have made bullish predictions before, forecasting a 2025 price $200,000 by year end.

Fold goes public

And another Bitcoin company has gone mainstream: Financial services company Fold, which has a debit card and rewards users with Bitcoin for buying through its app, began trading publicly on the Nasdaq Composite on Wednesday.

One of the few Bitcoin companies to trade publicly, the listing shows more mainstream acceptance of the industry. Surely that’s bullish, right? You might think so, but FLD started trading at $10 on Wednesday, rose above $13, and then proceeded to fall under the $7 mark by the end of the day Friday amid the aforementioned markets chaos.

DOG expands to Solana

Elsewhere, the most valuable Bitcoin Runes meme coin, DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (or just DOG), became available on Solana thanks to a bridge that lets people trade it across both chains. DOG’s pseudonymous creator Leonidas told Decrypt that the token was “just following in the footsteps of BTC” in becoming more available to a larger crowd—and putting Bitcoin-related products in the hands of more people. 

Not all Bitcoin maxis are likely to agree with that idea, but we’ll see whether it leads to a rise in the coin’s price. Right now, it’s up about 3% over the last 24 hours—but DOG has fallen sharply since hitting an all-time high price in December, down a whopping 72% since then.

Edited by Andrew Hayward