Crypto Investment Product AUM Down 55% in 2022

As the year comes to a close, crypto investment product issuers are ending 2022 in a worse position than they started.

In 2022, digital asset investment vehicles lost more than 55% in assets under management (AUM) from their peak at the beginning of the year, according to data from research firm CryptoCompare.

“Due to the current state of panic in the market following the collapse of FTX, and rumors of similar problems at Binance, average weekly net outflows from digital asset investment products reached -$9.5 [million] in December, the highest level recorded since June 2022,” CryptoCompare analysts wrote in the report.

AUM for crypto investment vehicles slightly recovered in December, with a 0.35% increase from November 2022.

Investors continued to express the most interest in bitcoin and ether over the course of the year, with bitcoin investment products representing 69.7% of market share and ether products holding 25% of market share.

“Bitcoin and Ethereum product AUMs are currently down 61% and 62.1%, respectively, from their peaks in March and April 2022,” analysts added. Bitcoin and ether prices have dropped a similar amount.

Traders were also most interested in crypto investment products in the form of ETFs, analysts noted. AUM represented by ETFs saw a rise of 5.96% to $1.78 billion in December 2022, representing 9.11% of the total market share.

Similar to the broader spot market, bitcoin futures ETFs are down over the year. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which launched in October 2021, is down about 64% year to date. The Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF is down almost equally as much, losing 63% since January 2022.

The 2022 end-of-year numbers for broader markets are skewed though, analysts point out, given the peak recorded across equity markets at the start of the year.

“By fluky coincidence, the all-time high in the S&P 500 happened to be Jan. 3, the very first trading day of 2022,” Blockworks newsletter writer Byron Gilliam wrote earlier this month.

“So the year-to-date performance in equities conveniently doubles as the high-to-low performance of the bear market. That’s never happened before and it makes all the YTD comparisons vs. history kind of meaningless: 2022 vs. any other calendar year is apples to oranges.”

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