Bitcoin’s Breakout Lacks One Key Ingredient – Everything You Need to Know

As Bitcoin hovers just 5% below its all-time high, one major investor segment remains conspicuously quiet: retail traders.

Bitcoin’s price has surged past $103K, but retail demand, defined as transactions in volumes between $0 and $10,000, remains flat or negative, according to CryptoQuant.

This finding is surprising considering the significant gains in BTC and the substantial institutional accumulation that has been frequently reported.

However, according to CryptoQuant’s analysis, the current setup shows a sort of lagging behavior by the retail segment, which is still in negative territory, even though market momentum and fundamentals have improved.

The crypto market intelligence platform speculates that this could be related to retail investors burning out quickly during the previous bull market and the lack of a strong narrative to engage them in the current rally.

According to the chart, during phases of market euphoria, there is usually a strong presence of retail demand, which increases rapidly as the market approaches a top.

This behavior is especially pronounced during parabolic market trends, where a small price increase leads to a large influx of traders, pushing the market even higher.

However, this pattern appears to be absent in the current bull market, at least according to the chart.

Despite the lagging behavior of retail investors, as highlighted by CryptoQuant, institutional investors appear to be actively accumulating Bitcoin.

According to recent reports, large Bitcoin holders have increased their holdings by over 200,000 BTC as the cryptocurrency's price surpasses the $100,000 mark.

Moreover, Bitcoin ETF (exchange-traded fund) inflows have reached a record high of $41.3 billion, now composing 60% of the total gold ETFs.

Furthermore, crypto analyst Ben Armstrong, known as BitBoy Crypto, suggests that Bitcoin could be leading global monetary trends with central banks engaging in quantitative easing (QE) and potential national bankruptcies on the horizon.