I think many institutional investors are accumulating Bitcoin.
i'm not yet convinced about this to be the main reason even though i keep hearing it used as the reason.
most institutional investors are already in and have bought the majority of the coins they wanted to buy. some of them did it months ago.
they also don't go to bitcoin exchanges to buy bitcoin, they go through other channels which means they don't really affect the price that we see in the market.
Umm, this is completely wrong.
Institutional investors are definitely not in. They've never been "in" outside of maybe a handful, which is like saying the general public was "in" back in 2011.
You keep hearing this narrative that institutions are driving up the price because it is true. Institutions have just started to get in a little bit - this will continue on for years - but it has finally started this Fall. We have Grayscale buying up literally hundreds of millions of dollars every single week (sometimes daily), these are accredited investors which I dunno if we'd call them all "institutional" per se, but at the very least they are a combo of rich Wall St investors and institutions. Then we have corporations like Square and Microstrategy buying in. We have various investment firms starting to buy in, a very very small portion of the investment firms out there at this point because, again, institutional investors are not "in" yet. And they buy through services like Coinbase's institutional services. So yes that is bitcoin that is coming out of exchanges, stripping supply from exchanges. Some of it probably is not on exchanges at all but plenty of it is.
So, in summary, institutional investors were not in already, not even remotely. We know for a fact institutional investors have finally started to get in the past few months, but still the number of them that are in at this point is very very small so this will continue literally for multiple years before they truly are "in". And yes plenty of this money is being bought off exchanges which removes Bitcoin supply from exchanges, thus causing a negative supply shock which results in the price shooting up as other buyers try to be the little remaining Bitcoin on exchanges.