EXCLUSIVE: 'Institutions Are Buying Bitcoin' — Retail Is Trading Everything Else

Bitcoin (CRYPTO:$BTC) is becoming the institutional crypto trade. Everything around it looks increasingly like retail territory. CoinMarketCap’s latest data shows institutions piling into spot Bitcoin ETFs while retail attention and trading activity spread across meme coins, AI tokens and tokenized stocks — creating a widening divide in how different investors are accessing crypto.

Institutions Choose Bitcoin

"Institutions are buying Bitcoin through ETFs. Retail is trading everything else through a phone," Alice Liu, Head of Research at CoinMarketCap, told Benzinga in an exclusive email interview.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF assets under management climbed from about $79 billion to $102 billion over the month as of Sept. 10, a roughly $23 billion increase.

Bitcoin’s dominance remained near 59%, close to the top of its 12-month range, even as capital and attention elsewhere in crypto accelerated.

That suggests institutional exposure is becoming increasingly concentrated around the largest digital asset rather than spreading evenly across the broader crypto market.

Retail Chases the Long Tail

Retail activity tells a very different story.

CoinMarketCap’s trending data recently placed a two-day-old meme token ahead of Solana, while AI projects, memecoins and tokenized equities continued attracting significant attention.