On-chain data suggests that retail Bitcoin investors are losing interest in the asset as their volume has dropped significantly over the past month.
Bitcoin Retail Investor Volume Has Seen a Significant Decline Recently
As explained by CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn in a new post on X, Retail Investor Demand has seen significant volatility recently. “Marketing Investor Demand” here means an indicator that tracks the demand for using a network that exists within a marketing group.
Retail investors are the smallest companies in the network, so their transactions tend to be smaller in size. Therefore, transaction volume related to money transfers with a value of less than $10,000 can be attributed to activity from these investors.
Retail Investor Demand uses the 30-day change in this volume to calculate its value. Below is a chart of the metric shared by the analyst showing its trend over the past few years.
The value of the metric appears to have registered a sharp plunge in recent weeks | Source: @JA_Maartun on X
As shown in the graph above, Bitcoin Retail Investor Demand reached record highs during the bull rally that took place in the last few months of 2024. This suggests that the rally attracted the attention of the masses, which led them to rally. a large number of movements in the network.
This is not a particularly unexpected pattern, as investors often find sharp price action exciting, so they are more active than usual. The spike rate was more notable this time, however, as the metric peaked at 31.7%.
Following this high, the volume of retail investors slowed down its rise and as the cryptocurrency’s decline entered, the 30 reversal of it went straight up into the red zone.
The decline in the volume of these shrimps is very strong in the new year 2025, as the Investment Demand is now sitting at a low of 21.7%.
This number suggests that the group’s activity has seen a decrease of 21.7% during the last 30 days. The drop is the biggest the metric has seen since mid-2021.
The cooling of interest from retail investors may not be all that bad for Bitcoin, however, as the aforementioned negative gap in 2021 occurs almost entirely at the bottom of the price.
In other news, Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has seen a record amount of cash outflows over the past week, according to data from market intelligence platform IntoTheBlock.
The weekly change in a couple of core ETH on-chain metrics | Source: IntoTheBlock on X
Overall, the central exchange saw a total of $1.42 billion worth of Ethereum leave their wallets over the past week, a sign that investors may be in the accumulation phase.
BTC price
Bitcoin fell to the $91,000 mark yesterday, but the asset seems to have recovered today as its price is now trading around $93,800.
Looks like the price of the coin has been following a downwards trajectory over the last few days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, CryptoQuant.com, IntoTheBlock.com, chart from TradingView.com