Close to 70 digital currency-focused hedge funds that cater exclusively to established investment entities like pension companies have shut down in the last few months.
According to U.S.-based Crypto Fund Research, as stated by Bloomberg late Wednesday, the number of new funding introduced this year is also less than 50 percent of the number of launches in 2018.
North America has increased the number of closures of virtual currency funds this year to 28, followed by Europe with 23, Asia-Pacific with 14, and others with 3.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies' extremely volatile nature has kept institutional investors at a distance. "The industry is certainly consumer-focused and will stay so for the foreseeable future," Nic Carter, co-founder of crypto sector tracker Coin Metrics, said.
According to Crypto Fund Research, there are actually a total of 804 electronic currency investments, 355 of which are hedge funds and 425 are venture capital.
The Big 5
The top five cryptocurrency investments, based on Crypto Fund's research, are Arrington XRP, BlockTower Capital, Brian Kelly Capital Management, Digital Currency Group, and Fenbushi Capital.
"To me, the reality that Bitcoin has only 10 years of corporate acceptance is a revolutionary achievement and beyond what anyone could have expected 3 or 4 years ago," said Spencer Bogart, general partner at Blockchain Capital, in the study.
In other developments, an order to sell 8 bitcoins (BTC) with a market value of around $60,000, clobbered the price of the world's most popular digital money in one trading session on crypto exchange Binance. The sale was either just an error, or it was deliberate.
The trade (sale) was made on the exchange Bitcoin/Stablecoin, digital currency that keeps its value bound to a fiat currency, like the US dollar, or otherwise referred to as Stable USD.
Unusually Large
With a 24-hour trading volume of just over $130,000, the large sell order accounted for more than 50 percent of the day's trade volume of such a currency pair, causing it to crash to a low of $681.81 before returning through the normal order books.
Bitcoin currently has a market value of $7,393 after the unexpected plunge, but still up 1.6 million for the day.
Stable USD was introduced by "Stably" last year. Nevertheless, since it's first few months, its market limit has been cut in half, suggesting that fewer people are using the stable coin.
Stable USD is now on the 542 spots of CoinMarketCap's ranking of cryptocurrencies. Similarly, stablecoins like Tether have seen their market values grow strongly around this time.
This is not the first time there has been a rapid change in a trading pair like this before. While bitcoin's price hit the $5,000 mark in April, it leaped on this trading pair up to $11,000, including on Binance.
