Coinbase Exec: Altcoin Markets Attracting Institutional Investors Amid Bitcoin and Ethereum Dominance

cryptonews.com:

While bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) remain the top coins, altcoins are still drawing significant interest from institutional investors, argued David Duong, Head of Institutional Research at major crypto exchange Coinbase.

Duong participated in a discussion with popular crypto analyst Scott Melker on March 2, as part of an interview panel that also featured the Founder of crypto options trading platform Hxro Dan Gunsberg and the Founder of investment adviser Morgan Creek Capital Mark Yusko. 

Discussing the crypto market performance over the past year, Duong noted that what he is currently seeing in terms of flows on the exchange from Coinbase's institutional clients is that,

"55% of this is still on bitcoin and ETH, but that would mean that the remainder is still on altcoin - 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."

What we are currently witnessing in the market is a lot more macro-focused, he added, arguing that people don't realize that this is "just seasonally a weaker period for a lot of risk assets" because everything is now in an in-between state where, on the one side, "people have their bonus payments, putting money into their 401(k)", which are personal pension accounts in the USA, and on the other side, it is the time "right before we're getting a lot of checks being cut for tax season."

Therefore, Duong said,

"We're in this kind of like weak period, but we're trying to draw conclusions about what's happening with the [Federal Reserve] or what's happening with other things, the correlation, which by the way is coming down between crypto and other risk assets."  

He concluded that, "if anything", macro conditions for risk