Bitcoin on Track for Its Worst Quarterly Close Since 2018

The U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) ended their remarkable streak of ten consecutive days of positive net inflows on Friday. This interruption comes at a time when Bitcoin is dangerously close to its worst quarterly performance since 2018.

A series of capital inflows finally interrupted

The spot Bitcoin ETFs saw their longest series of capital inflows of the year come to a sudden halt last Friday. It was the Fidelity FBTC fund that primarily contributed to this break by recording massive outflows of $93.16 million, while other funds saw no significant activity.

This interruption is all the more notable as the day before, the same FBTC fund had attracted $97.14 million in investments.

During this ten-day period, trading volumes remained relatively stable, reaching $2.22 billion on Friday, slightly above the previous days.

The positive streak had allowed the ETFs to add more than one billion dollars in value, an amount that Min Jung, an analyst at Presto Research, described as “relatively modest”.

According to him, “this suggests that even if institutions are not aggressively risk-prone, there is still a demand for exposure to Bitcoin in the market“.

A Bitcoin market still searching for its direction

Bitcoin is currently heading towards its worst first-quarter close since 2018. The leading cryptocurrency shows a decline of 11.67% for the first quarter of 2025, according to data from CoinGlass.

To put this performance into perspective, a slight recovery could still allow Bitcoin to perform better than the 10.83% loss recorded in the first quarter of 2020, but it will remain far from the catastrophic drop of 49.7% in the first quarter of 2018.

Meanwhile, Ethereum ETFs are experiencing a different dynamic. After seventeen consecutive days of net outflows, they recorded a rare day of positive inflows, mainly thanks to Grayscale’s ETHE fund, which attracted $4.68 million.

Despite this slight improvement, the gap remains significant between the total assets of Ethereum ETFs ($6.42 billion) and those of Bitcoin ETFs ($94.39 billion).

Ethereum is currently preparing for the deployment of its Pectra update, scheduled for late April or early May, following the success of its implementation on the Hoodi test network last Wednesday. Despite this technical advance, the ETH price has also fallen by about 2.5% in the last 24 hours.

This end of the positive streak for Bitcoin ETFs reflects the current caution of investors. Despite the risks of a drop to $65,000, the horizon could clear with the imminent arrival of liquidity from central banks, likely to revitalize the entire crypto market.