So Brian Amrstrong, CEO of Coinbase, made an interesting comment about the amount of money coming in from institutional investors. The tweet, which was obviously intended as a sign that the market is growing, has instead elicited quite a bit of criticism from the cryptocommunity and it’s not difficult to see why.

Armstrong tweeted that Coinbase Custody had become the number 1 custodian for institutional investors following the acquisition of Xapo’s institutional investment business. The acquisition made Coinbase the custodian of $7 billion worth of assets,

Armstrong then went on to say that the doubt regarding the arrival of institutional investment had been put to rest as Coinbase was “seeing $200-400M a week in new crypto deposits come in from institutional customers”,

But there are some questions to be asked here. If the average funds coming in from institutional investors is $300 million a week, that’s well over $1 billion in a month. But where is this money going? And that is precisely the question everyone is asking. It would have helped if there were some reports and hard evidence to back up the numbers, but there isn’t, so the skepticism isn’t surprising.

In other news, the United Kingdom’s Barclays bank has stopped banking services for Coinbase - and why would they do that if Coinbase is really picking up in terms of institutional investment? Not that I’m saying something is off, I just wish things were more TRANSPARENT. A bunch of money going into the tokens and causing pumps is going to harm the market and affect a lot of users.

The lack of details is troubling but perhaps we will get some information in the weeks to come.