Institutions Are Not Interested in Crypto, Says JPMorgan Senior Strategist

Institutional investors feel relieved they stayed away from crypto, said Jared Gross.

Despite the massive bull market in 2020 and 2021, institutions have remained on the crypto sidelines and feel relieved about it.

This is what a JPMorgan senior investment strategist argued recently, indicating that the interest in the asset class from such investors is “effectively nonexistent.”

The most notable bull run in the cryptocurrency market started at the end of 2020 and lasted for about a year, seeing prices explode to new highs. Bitcoin, for one, went from under $10,000 to $69,000 within that timeframe, becoming a trillion-dollar asset at the time.

There were multiple reports during this cycle that large individual investors, as well as institutions, are getting on the bandwagon, including MassMutual, One River, and others.

However, JPM’s senior investment analyst – Jared Gross – believes this interest has either disappeared or has never been at the scene at all.

He blamed it on the enhanced volatility and argued that most institutions are relieved that they missed out on last year’s rally because of everything that happened in 2022 and the massive price declines.

“As an asset class, crypto is effectively nonexistent for most large institutional investors. The volatility is too high, and the lack of an intrinsic return that you can point to makes it very challenging. Most institutional investors probably are breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t jump into that market and are probably not going to be doing so anytime soon.” – he said during a podcast with Bloomberg.

It’s worth noting that JPM has always had a controversial relationship with the crypto industry. In fact, it almost seems like it uses the bull markets to ramp up the market, which was the case following MassMutual’s purchase, and the bear cycles to predict even gloomier developments.