Demand For Bitcoin Plunges By 895,000 BTC Despite ETF Purchases

While institutional enthusiasm for bitcoin seemed sufficient to fuel a new bullish run, the on-chain reality tells a completely different story. Despite persistent purchases of ETFs and publicly traded companies like MicroStrategy, the market is experiencing a sharp drop in overall demand, amounting to 895,000 BTC. This invisible but decisive contraction calls into question hopes for a new short-term peak.

Institutional accumulation unable to ignite the market

At first glance, institutions’ appetite for bitcoin should have been enough to push its price to new highs. Giants like MicroStrategy and American ETFs have continued their accumulation strategy, stacking thousands of BTC in their portfolios. Yet, the bitcoin curve stubbornly remains flat. Behind this stagnation lies a paradox: a free-falling overall demand that undermines the foundations of a potential bullish rally.

According to the latest Cryptoquant report, combined purchases by ETFs and MicroStrategy represent barely a third of the demand observed during the December 2024 peak. Moreover, these same players have significantly slowed their acquisitions since then.

Within seven months, ETF purchase flows have been halved. As for MSTR, it is a pure and simple collapse: -90%. The illusion of a bullish market fueled by institutions cracks.

What the numbers brutally reveal is that usual catalysts like favorable regulation, institutional adoption, and digital scarcity are no longer enough. Bitcoin is running out of oxygen. And this oxygen is real demand, far more diffuse and complex than that of the finance giants alone.

A demand that quietly evaporates

What worries analysts is less the drop in institutional purchases than the massive contraction of overall demand. In the last 30 days analyzed, 895,000 BTC of demand have evaporated. This drop, invisible to the untrained eye, has the immediate effect of neutralizing any lasting upward pressure.

We are not talking about simple profit-taking or sector rotations. This is a structural retreat in participation in the spot market, the one that dictates the real rules of the game. In short, small and medium holders are deserting, disillusioned or tired of waiting for a rally without fuel.

The phenomenon is not temporary: over a year, demand has shrunk by 857,000 BTC, far more than the combined accumulation of MSTR and ETFs (748,000 BTC). In other words, even the biggest buyers in the market cannot compensate for the lack of collective enthusiasm. The dynamic is unbalanced. Without growth drivers outside institutional spheres, bitcoin finds itself on neutral ground.

Bitcoin: between consolidation and uncertainty

In this context, bitcoin’s price is not falling dramatically… but it isn’t soaring either. It is a sign of a market in a consolidation phase, a long and silent breath that may precede a new cycle. But the demand must restart.

This latency phase exposes an essential fact: bitcoin’s value is not decreed in boardrooms but in the digital street, among users, independent traders, neobanks, countries in crisis, or decentralized protocols. However, these engines currently seem to be on standby.

Based on the numbers, the institutional frenzy from early 2024 has given way to generalized wait-and-see. And as long as the overall demand — organic, liquid, dispersed — does not resume, no ETF, however greedy, will be able to restart the machine.

Bitcoin thus remains suspended in a paradox: it is accumulated like a treasure but traded like a burden. To get out of this deadlock, the market will have to rediscover the appetite for risk, the desire to own BTC for more than its valuation potential. Because without desire, there is no market. And without market, no peak.