Coinbase Executive Says Institutions Looking Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum and Into Altcoin Markets

One of Coinbase’s top executives says that institutional investors may be more open to crypto assets beyond Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) than people realize.

Speaking in a live stream with crypto analyst Scott Melker, Coinbase’s head of institutional research David Duong says that nearly half of all the institutional flows on Coinbase are going toward assets other than BTC and ETH.

“My remit is broader than just Bitcoin, and what I’m seeing right now, just in terms of flows that we’re seeing from our institutional clients on our exchange, 55% of this is still on Bitcoin and ETH, but that would mean that the remainder is still in altcoins, so there’s still a lot of attention being paid to what’s happening in the rest of the ecosystem outside of just Bitcoin and Ethereum. That said, of course, Ethereum with be the next big event risk on the Shanghai fork, still on people’s radar.”

Duong says that at the moment, market conditions remain in relatively uncertain conditions due to macro reasons, seasonality and the potential for crypto to decorrelate from other risk assets.

“I think what’s happening right now tends to be a lot more macro-focused, insofar as, I think what people don’t realize is this just seasonally a weaker period for a lot of risk assets because we’re in between that period where people have their bonus payments, putting money into their 401ks, and right before we’re getting a lot of checks being cut for tax season. 

So we’re in this kind of weak period, but we’re trying to draw conclusions about what’s happening with the Fed, or what’s happening with other things, [and] correlation, which by the way is coming down between crypto and other risk assets.”

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