PANews January 21 News, suspected “1011 Insider Whale” Garrett Jin posted on X platform that some media outlets have seriously misinterpreted Wintermute’s views. The increase in institutional participation does not signal the end of the crypto bull market, but rather marks a new phase where the market shifts from being driven by speculation to being driven by allocation. The expansion of institutional funds (especially ETF asset management scales) typically pushes asset prices higher and reduces volatility, which is a fundamental market law. Historical data shows that whether in China’s A-shares or the US stock market, after large-scale institutional entry, market structures become more stable and trend-oriented. Currently, Bitcoin and Ethereum are experiencing the same path: large-scale buying by ETFs and digital asset treasuries drives prices up, while volatility significantly decreases. This is precisely the transition from a “speculative regime” to an “allocation regime.”
The core point of Wintermute’s original report is: as institutional participation deepens, top crypto assets like BTC and ETH are transforming from speculative tools into allocatable assets. Its main observations include: institutional trading volume has far surpassed retail; meme coin trading and capital inflows have sharply declined; institutional inflows accelerated in the second half of 2025; the market crash in October last year further solidified the dominance of mainstream assets and widened their structural gap with meme coins; after the crash, retail funds also flowed back into BTC and ETH as defensive allocations. Garrett summarized that this is not the end of the bull market, but the end of the “retail-driven, high-volatility, meme-dominated” phase of mainstream crypto assets. The market is undergoing a systemic shift: from speculation to allocation, from retail sentiment-driven to institutional position-driven, from extreme volatility to institutional-level volatility. Misinterpreting this maturation process as the “end of the bull market” is a misunderstanding of market development laws.
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