Bitcoin, Ether fall while spot bitcoin ETFs log record outflows

The price of bitcoin dropped to its lowest point in the past two weeks — falling 5.18% in the past 24 hours to trade at $61,380 as of 1:50 p.m. Hong Kong time, according to The Block’s Price Page . Ether fell 7.8% to $3,090.

While the two largest cryptocurrencies have fallen back to their value in the last week of February, all other top 10 non-stablecoin crypto tokens in terms of market capitalization have also declined on Wednesday in Asia.

The price fall coincided with significant outflows from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). On Tuesday, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs experienced $326.2 million in outflows, the largest since their debut. GBTC alone saw $444 million exit the fund, while other ETFs saw weaker inflows, according to data from Farside.

Move to Solana

Aside from ETF outflows, BTC Markets’ Head of Marketing and Communications Rachael Lucas told The Block that “speculative shifts to smaller coins like SOL and AVAX, and meme coins like WIF” have contributed to bitcoin’s drop.

Accompanied by a $700,000 advertisement on the Vegas sphere , memecoins on Solana such as dogwifhat and Slerf have experienced feverish popularity, driving the network’s on-chain volumes and fees to record highs .  

Economist Alex Krüger also wrote on X that the Solana mania “went too far,” noting that there has been too much leverage in crypto, which contributed the most to the decline.

“Ethereum ETH -6.39% 's price is tied to Bitcoin's, while delays in SEC decisions on proposed Ether ETFs by Hashdex and ARK 21Shares increase uncertainty, and Grayscale considers adding staking to its Ether ETF application,” BTC Markets’ Lucas added.

The global cryptocurrency market capitalization fell 4.5% in the past 24 hours to $2.42 trillion, according to CoinGecko .