Losses are piling up in crypto after the digital asset market’s second worst weekly drop of 2024, a reflection of cooling demand for bitcoin exchange-traded funds and uncertainty over monetary policy.

A gauge of the largest 100 digital assets fell about 5% in the seven days through to Sunday, the worst such decline since April.

Market leader bitcoin slid below US$63 000 on Monday to a more than one-month low, hurt by a six-day streak of outflows from US ETFs for the token.

The cracks in crypto come amid doubts about the US Federal Reserve’s scope to cut interest rates quickly from a two-decade high. For some analysts, the retreat in digital assets is a warning sign for broader risk appetite.

The current crypto market dynamic is “characterised by low volatility, soft volumes and order books getting unbalanced when prices start to move to the edges of their range,” David Lawant, research head at FalconX, wrote in a note.

The drops in some corners are particularly notable: the run of weekly declines for ether and solana are the longest since last year and 2022 respectively.

Ether ETFs

That’s even as fund companies prepare to launch the first US ETFs investing directly in ether, the second-ranked crypto asset. Solana, meanwhile, was very recently a favourite for a variety of digital-asset hedge funds.