The headline may look like ragebait but at the current outflow rate its an objective truth. Since Bitcoin hit its all-time high last October, US spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen outflows on 55 days out of 89. If this doesn’t turn around before the next halving there will be a lot less BTC inside ETF wrappers on that day.
Before we look at how quickly ETFs could trend toward zero, let’s look at the “glass half full” perspective of the current situation (skip to here if you’re only here for the bearish take).
Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst Eric Balchunas today pointed to the number he believes matters more than most, cumulative net inflows into US spot Bitcoin ETFs.
He highlighted the total peaked around $63 billion in October, and sits around $53 billion today, with roughly $8 billion in outflows during a steep drawdown.
The point he was making was simple; a lot of money has come in, and a lot of it has stayed.
That matters because the story around Bitcoin’s relationship with Wall Street has started to change tone.
The easy version goes like this, ETFs arrived, institutions showed up, Bitcoin became “grown up.” Then the market rolled over, and the same institutions headed for the exits. Reality looks messier, and more human.
Zoom out and the ETF era still reads like a shockingly large success by sheer net intake.
Cumulative net inflows for US spot Bitcoin ETFs sit at about $54.31 billion, even after recent bleeding, which is an enormous number for a product category that is still only a couple years old.
Zoom in and the last few months feel like a different movie.
Since the October crash, $8.66 billion has flowed out of US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, and Bitcoin has fallen more than 40% from its October peak near $126,000.
Those two truths can sit together and still describe the same world. People buy for different reasons, and people sell for different reasons. A shiny wrapper turns Bitcoin into something you can click in a brokerage account while you are eating lunch, and that single change brings a wider mix of motives into the trade.
That resonates with those outside Wall Street lives inside that mix. “Institutional adoption” looks like a thousand committees, advisors, platforms, and individuals making small choices that add up to a giant, visible tape.
The tape invites storytelling, and it also invites mistakes, because a number that updates every day can feel like a verdict.
To understand the underlying trade happening on Wall Street, however, we need to pair ETF outflows with another signal, futures exposure on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. This is because Authorized Participants (and other institutions) use futures to arbitrage risk and profit from their role in providing BTC for ETF baskets of shares.
CME exposure fell by about two-thirds from a late-2024 peak to roughly $8 billion, and that lines up with the sense that the biggest, cleanest institutional venues are carrying less risk than they did at the top.
Wall Street’s footprints keep showing up
CME itself publishes dashboards for Bitcoin futures volume and activity, and the broader message is easy to follow, participation expands, participation contracts, and when it contracts across multiple venues at once, every rally attempt feels different.
Coinbase, the venue many US institutions prefer, has traded at a discount to offshore exchange Binance, a sign of sustained US selling. If you are trying to understand why Bitcoin feels heavy even when other risk assets find buyers, that detail matters.
The flow story has texture too, and the texture is where the people are. In mid-January, the spot Bitcoin ETF cohort took in roughly $760 million in a single day, the biggest one-day haul since October, with Fidelity’s FBTC making up a large chunk of that. It’s not been a total washout but those good days have been far outnumbered by the bad days.
Still, a lot of the institutional story lives in these overlapping signals, steady lifetime accumulation alongside jagged bursts of selling, and sudden days where buyers look organized again.
The tricky part is deciding which signal speaks for the next month, and which signal speaks for the last month.
Macro still sets the temperature
Sometimes the simplest driver sits outside the room.
In February, Reuters reported US equity funds saw net outflows of about $1.42 billion in the week to Feb. 11, tied to rate-cut uncertainty after a strong jobs report, plus anxiety around heavy corporate spending linked to AI. Bond funds, by contrast, pulled in money. That is a classic risk sorting moment, and Bitcoin tends to feel those moments more than it likes to admit.
Rates staying restrictive keeps portfolios picky, and it pushes investors toward cleaner stories. Bitcoin has fallen more than 40% from its October peak near $126,000 while stocks and precious metals found buyers, which tells you the market is treating Bitcoin like a liquidity-sensitive asset in this stretch.
Balchunas’ flow chart lands inside that backdrop. The cumulative number remains massive, and it arrived faster than most predictions, and the near-term tape shows how quickly conviction shifts when price slides.
Bitcoin ETFs impending slow death
The latest AUM snapshot puts the combined total at $98.33B.
The centre of gravity is obvious, IBIT sits at $57.01 billion on its own, with FBTC at $13.94 billion and GBTC at $12.58 billion forming the next tier, then a cluster behind them with BITB at $5.79 billion and ARKB at $5.36 billion.
After that you can see the long tail where the numbers still matter, just in a different way, HODL is $1.37 billion, EZBC is $728.57 million, BTCO is $696.58 million, BTCW is $462.49 million, and BRRR is $398.00 million.
That spread tells a human story as much as a market one, because it shows how quickly liquidity and trust concentrate when institutions decide a product is “the” default choice, and how everyone else has to fight for attention even while the whole category keeps growing.
Given that since 10 October 2025, $8.66 billion has exited the ETFs, spread over the 89 trading days in that window, that works out at about $90 million leaving per trading day.
If you keep that pace constant and treat the current $98 billion AUM as the starting point, you get roughly 1,011 trading days until the wrappers are effectively drained.
Put in real terms, that’s about four years of weekday-sized bleeding before the ETF complex hits the wall in early January 2030, assuming nothing changes.
In reality, few would expect Bitcoin to avoid any sort of rally at all in the next four years. However, we could see sustained pressure throughout the bear market. So, let’s look at where we could be if the bear market does not end before the next halving.
The next Bitcoin halving is estimated to be around 11 April 2028, which is about 558 trading days away from here, and that gives a useful horizon for stress-testing what “sticky” demand really looks like.
Using the same run-rate assumption, the maths leaves about $44 billion of AUM by the next halving.
Converting that into BTC depends on price, but at around a mid-$60k spot level for Bitcoin, it works out in the region of 662k BTC still sitting inside the wrappers.
However, if we take “no more BTC left in ETFs” as “cumulative net inflows grind down to zero,” things look even worse.
Using the post–Oct 10 outflow pace, then $53B / $90M = 590 trading days, which would be just after the halving, around mid-2028 (give or take depending on flows and holiday count).
What to watch next
Thought experiment out of the way, start with looking at the daily ETF flow tape.
Outflows cooling into a flatter pattern often brings sentiment with it. Inflows stringing together for multiple sessions can change the headlines just as quickly. For a simple triangulation tool beyond major outlets, CoinGlass tracks ETF flows in one place, and it helps to see the rhythm of the tape.
Then watch CME participation. Open interest and activity stabilizing, then rising, usually means bigger players are putting risk back on in the cleanest US venue. CME’s own pages help you follow the direction of travel over time.
Keep an eye on the US-versus-offshore spread too. Coinbase printing a persistent discount to Binance strengthens the US selling signal. That discount narrowing points to pressure easing on the US side of the market.
Macro volatility remains the backdrop. Fund flow data offers a weekly pulse check on how nervous the biggest pools of capital feel. Rate-cut expectations swinging, equities wobbling, credit tightening, those shifts tend to travel through Bitcoin quickly.
This set of signals guarantees very little, and it offers a map for how the next chapter might read.
The real takeaway from this ETF chapter is that Bitcoin has a public scoreboard for institutional behavior, and that scoreboard has become part of the market itself.
When the number rises, it invites new believers. When the number falls, it invites new doubts. When the number stays positive over years, it rewrites the baseline, and it forces everyone to treat the Wall Street relationship as sticky.
So when we write articles saying ETF flows need to reverse soon, there’s short-term relevance for the current bear market.
However, if they don’t reverse at all, the entire narrative around Bitcoin will flip and things could get very ugly. Sustaining $53 to $98 billion in selling pressure is not something Bitcoin will handle lightly.