The crypto market fell during the European morning, with bitcoin falling to $91,200 after reaching a weekly high of $94,200 on Wednesday.
The decline was limited to cryptocurrencies, with US stocks little changed in pre-market trading and the FTSE100 index up 0.15%.
The sell-off can be attributed to record outflows from BlackRock’s IBIT bitcoin ETF, with an additional $113 million of outflows recorded as cryptocurrency bulls cannot resist the grip of the aux market.
The Fear and Greed index remains depressed at 25/100, failing to find its way into a neutral zone after being below 40/100 for over a month.
Derivatives positioning
- The BTC futures market shows sustained caution and aggressive deleveraging. Open interest (OI) has fallen to $21 billion from $25 billion a month ago, indicating a reduction in leverage and risk exposure of traders.
- This deleveraging is occurring alongside consistently low market derivatives metrics: the three-month annualized basis is stable at 4%-5%, and funding rates are stable at 5%-6% across major venues, with neither metric showing a significant change in the last month.
- BTC options accumulate a high bias soutenu malgré the base of volatility. The structure of the implied volatility (IV) term for the cut-off term is indicative of forwardation versus a more typical contango, indicating a base of immediate price movements and extreme assistance.
- However, the volume tilt remains bullish, with 24-hour put/call options volume still at 57% in favor of calls. Crucially, the 25 delta one-week slope has seen a slight recent rise to 8%, confirming that traders are still paying a premium for short-term upside exposure.
- Recent BTC price volatility led to liquidations of $280 million in 24 hours, with $200 million being long positions. ETH ($88 million) and BTC ($85 million) lead in terms of nominal liquidations.
- The BTC/USDT liquidation heat map on Binance suggests a large number of long liquidations around $90,600, according to data from Coinglass. That is the level to take into account, in case of a price drop.
Token talk
- The altcoin market performed equally poorly in the last 24 hours, with TAO, HYPE, and NEAR losing more than 6.5% of their value.
- But the biggest story was the ether price action. . Less than a day after its long-awaited Fusaka upgrade, ETH gave back much of its early gains, falling 2.62% from its daily high at 03:00 UTC.
- ETH’s muted price action paints a telling story for the broader altcoin market as even supposed bullish catalysts are falling on deaf ears.
- The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) reflected the decline in ETH, while CDMEME, CoinDesk’s memecoin index, fell 5.8% in the last 24 hours.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator stalled at 21/100, apparently remaining stuck in a bearish zone with traders opting for the consistency of bitcoin and the security of stablecoins.
- Two exceptions to Friday’s crash: the privacy coin zcash and TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain, which rose 4.7% and 1.8%, respectively.
- In the case of ZEC, it is recovering from a corrective phase in which it became “oversold” on the relative strength index (RSI). Meanwhile, TRX appears to be running its own race having posted gains on the daily, weekly and monthly timeframes.
