Crypto’s ‘Summer of Apathy’ Could Turn to ‘Winter of Discontent’, Says Meltem Demirors – Here’s What She Means

CoinShares chief strategy officer (CSO) Meltem Demirors is issuing a warning on the crypto markets after a summer of relatively muted volatility.

In a new Bloomberg interview, Demirors says that there’s a high level of uncertainty in the crypto industry and it is putting off various market participants.

“Sentiment is expressed as flow in the market and if we look at flows, I jokingly call it the summer of apathy – the summer that we just had – despite all of this great news, we did see flows into crypto structured products and a pop in Bitcoin when we saw the BlackRock [spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) application] news.

But over the last month, we’ve seen $300 million in outflows. Last week, 70% less trading volume in publicly listed crypto products, and we’re also down 30% in trading volume on the spot and derivatives side.

That’s summer of apathy with all of this uncertainty… There’s just a lot of uncertainty and right now what we’re seeing is that summer of apathy has the potential to turn into a winter discontent as we continue to see investors, traders, market makers, sitting on the sidelines.”

According to the CoinShares CSO, there’s consensus among both Democrats and Republicans that the US lawmakers need to offer the crypto industry regulatory certainty.

“I do think we’re both parties agree and where we’re seeing a lot of agreement is that something needs to be done. I’ve been in this industry for almost a decade. I live in the United States. I’ve built multiple businesses dealing with crypto in the United States. I don’t want to have to consider moving just because we can’t get our stuff together on the policy side.

It’s very clear that we need something cohesive, and it has to come from Congress because it’s clear that the alphabet soup of agencies simply is not going to agree.

And again, I’m kind of scared to see how all this is going to get untangled because, at this point, there are so many lawsuits, so many cases, so many different precedents being set, it’s really going to take this being a bipartisan effort everyone coming together to get something done.”

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