Institutions Buying The Bitcoin Dip? Coinbase Premium Shoots Up

Data shows the Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap has witnessed a spike, a sign that American investors may be buying at post-dip prices.

In a new post on X, CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn has talked about the latest trend in the Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap. This metric measures the difference between the Bitcoin price listed on Coinbase (USD pair) and that on Binance (USDT pair).

The indicator tells us about how the buying or selling behavior differs between the userbases of the two platforms. The former is the main platform of the American investors (especially the large institutional entities), while the latter gets users from around the world.

Here is the chart shared by Maartunn that shows the trend in the Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap over the past week:

As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap surged to notable positive levels on Wednesday, indicating that BTC was going for more on Coinbase than Binance. In other words, Coinbase users were participating in a higher amount of buying than Binance traders.

What followed the accumulation from the US-based entities was a surge in BTC’s price to a new all-time high (ATH). The cryptocurrency saw a plunge on Thursday and has continued to trade at lows today, but interestingly, the Coinbase Premium Gap has only noticed a further uptick.

This could be a sign that American institutional investors are looking at the dip as a buying opportunity. Since the start of 2024, this cohort has often taken the driving seat in the market, so it only remains to be seen whether this accumulation would also lead somewhere.

Another sign that could point at dip-buying occurring in the sector is the trend in the USDC Exchange Inflow, as the analyst has discussed in another X post.

The “Exchange Inflow” is an on-chain indicator that tracks, as its name suggests, the amount of a given asset that investors are depositing into wallets associated with centralized exchanges. In the current case, the cryptocurrency involved is the stablecoin USDC.

Generally, holders transfer their coins to exchanges when they want to sell, so an uptick in the metric for coins like Bitcoin can be a bearish sign for their prices. For stablecoins, however, the same isn’t true, as their prices are by definition stable around $1. Instead, stablecoin inflows have an effect on the volatile assets: investors use them to buy BTC and others, thus providing a bullish boost to their value.

Since the BTC price plunge, the USDC Exchange Inflow has amounted to a whopping $3.88 billion. “Investors are treating it as a buy-the-dip opportunity,” notes Maartunn.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $117,800, down 1% over the last 24 hours.