Key Takeaways
Why has retail participation fallen so dramatically?
The arrival of ETFs in January 2024 was a major cause for the decline in retail investor participation in Bitcoin flows to exchanges.
What does it mean for Bitcoin?
It will not affect Bitcoin or its price movements, although it does highlight how reality has shifted dramatically from Satoshi’s original vision for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin [BTC] faced a new wave of selling pressure on Monday, November 3. An earlier AMBCrypto report noted that this could be the early stages of a broader unwind, driven by over-leverage and declining sentiment.
There was a risk of a deeper flush. The buildup of stablecoins’ firepower could trigger a bullish reversal, and the price action of recent weeks could be another market bottom.
Naturally, the major liquidations of the past month made new investors hesitant to step in.
Retail participation has fallen, but it wasn’t just the recent chaos that has driven smaller participants away from the onchain business.
Mapping Bitcoin inflows from retail investors
The collapse of retail participation was not sudden and catastrophic, but steady and prolonged. In a message at CryptoQuant Insightsuser Donkerfost pointed out that retail inflows have fallen to just 20% of what they were at the beginning of 2024.
Source: CryptoQuant Insights
Using the 90-day moving average of shrimp inflows into Binance, Darkfost found that the launch of Spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 accelerated the decline. For the uninitiated, these investors own less than 0.1 BTC.
Average daily inflows dropped from around 450 BTC at the start of the year to just 92 BTC at the time of writing.
Furthermore, this is consistent with broader evidence across the chain showing that smaller investors have been less active even as prices rose.
Shrimp addresses experienced a slowdown
Source: Glass junction
AMBCrypto’s review of Glassnode data confirmed that the number of addresses holding at least 0.1 BTC stalled after a strong run in 2022. Until the end of 2023, the number rose steadily, reaching 4.58 million, but has since fallen to 4.44 million.
That slowdown meant that many retail users turned to exposure to ETFs rather than buying Bitcoin directly and withdrawing it from exchanges. It suggested a structural shift in the way new entrants gain BTC exposure.
Shrimp’s impact fades as institutions expand
Source: CryptoQuant
The effect of the declining participation of small investors was probably negligible.
Since 2023, the lowest inflow of 7-DMA BTC to Binance was 3,936.4 BTC in early July 2025. This was an order of magnitude larger than the influx of shrimp addresses at the end of 2023.
Shrimp-sized transactions no longer move the market needle. Institutional dominance and ETF vehicles have changed the way retail interacts with the network.
The original vision of Bitcoin was to be used as a peer-to-peer electronic cash without permission. A lot has changed in recent years, but Bitcoin continues to function, even if it now differs from what Satoshi might have imagined.
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