The post ETF fatigue shows flat flows can be worse than outflows for Bitcoin appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs gave the market a clean, daily scoreboard: a green print meant fresh cash crossing the boundary from traditional brokerage accounts into Bitcoin exposure, and a red print meant the opposite. For much of the first year of spot ETFs in the US, that scoreboard tracked sentiment and set the market’s tempo. Traders learned to treat flows as the simplest proxy for a real bid, because the buyer was observable, usually price-insensitive, and large enough to matter. But that habit is now getting seriously stress-tested. The risk in this phase now comes from flat days, because the cushion disappears without a reset. By mid-February 2026, mainstream coverage started framing the same idea: Bitcoin has struggled to break through nearby levels while ETF demand cools, and caution returns as the ETF honeymoon fades. While the details differ across outlets, the shared premise is easy to recognize on any flow tracker. Sessions flip between small greens, zeros, and reds, with fewer of the relentless up-only intake days that trained everyone to anchor on the tape. What we have now is ETF fatigue, and it happens when the scoreboard stops acting like a metronome for the rest of the market. Flows still matter, sometimes a lot, but they’ve stopped behaving like a daily engine. They’ve turned into confirmation, or a missing ingredient, rather than the whole recipe. The price is now listening harder to other inputs: derivatives, macro rates, and liquidity. Over time, the market adapts. Allocations settle into rebalancing rhythms, hedging gets more efficient, and the surprise factor in the daily print fades. The flow still counts, but it seems to have stopped setting direction by itself. When the 7-day average drifts toward zero for a full week, the price starts taking cues from positioning and liquidity rather than the…

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Filed under: News - @ February 22, 2026 9:12 pm