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Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal believes the recent volatility in the Bitcoin price is due to institutions selling to help shore up their end-of-year profits, 

The perennial Bitcoin (BTC) bull told Vlad from The Stakeborg Talks in a Dec. 27 interview that he believes the market is currently lopsided due to the effect of institutions. Pal said that they have been selling to lock in their profits. It was a way for institutions to say “I believe in getting paid.”

Considering that much of the selling in December has come from wallets that accumulated Bitcoin around the summer according to Glassnode, and that institutional assets under management (AUM) of cryptocurrency surged in May and Oct. according to Coinshares, the timing of the selling indeed points to institutions unloading some bags.

“Now the question is, ‘Are they done?’” asked Pal.

“It looks like they’re done because the market has been chopping around for the past week, which was the traditional last week of everybody squaring their books.”

While he predicts that there could be further selling out of Asia, Pal expects 2022 to begin with a strong start for the crypto markets as the capital from institutions gets redeployed.

Pal believes that institutional investors will become increasingly bullish on cryptocurrency through 2022 as they begin to better understand the ever increasing adoption of the technology “and therefore what that implies in market cap” by the end of the decade.

Related: Analysts say 2022 will be ‘defined by agility and cost-efficiency’ instead of ‘blockchain purity’

Noelle Acheson from Genesis Trading shares Pal’s insights on institutional bullishness on crypto going into 2022. She discussed institutional trends from 2021 and pointed out some potential highlights for 2022 on CNBC’s Squawk Box today.

“The institutional growth over the past 12 months has been astonishing and we’re seeing strong signs of that accelerating through next year both through direct investment and through investment in crypto market infrastructure companies themselves.”

Bitcoin is currently down about 3.5% over the past 24 hours and trading at $47,954 at the time of writing.