Institutional investors dominate the market, changing how Bitcoin price discovery occurs. According to Wintermute, institutional clients made up 72% of trading volume on its over-the-counter trading desk in the first half of 2026, compared with 59% in the same period of 2025.
Institutional flow has increased as a percentage of Wintermute’s OTC spot business, constituting 61% of flow in H2 2025 and 72% in Q1 2026. Hedge funds, asset managers, private wealth companies and corporate treasuries have increasingly filled up the market as some retail participants moved back toward equities in the prolonged downturn.
Wintermute found that institutional flows into tokens recede more quickly after reaching a peak price than flows from retail traders, which persist three days longer than institutional flows.
These gaps may explain the decreasing length of many rallies, as well as the trend of capital increasingly concentrating on specific assets rather than being evenly distributed across altcoins.
Wintermute states that Bitcoin’s realized volatility has gone from 70% in the previous cycles to around 45% in this cycle. A reason for this could be that the larger players in the market are more cautious this cycle, and professional traders are utilizing more derivatives.
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The amount of altcoin options on Wintermute’s OTC desk rose more than 3.4 times from the second half of 2025 to the first half of 2026, allowing funds to hedge their positions via options and futures without affecting the spot market.
The institutional case for allocating to assets is increasingly one of portfolio construction rather than speculation. CoinShares surveyed 26 fund managers with $1.3 trillion of assets in May.
