bitcoin rose 1.2% after midnight UTC, mirroring gains in US stocks, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 1% over the same period.
The gains follow oil’s plunge below $100 a barrel on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump proposed a “15-point plan” to end the war in Iran, although Iranian officials dismissed Trump’s statement as fake news.
The cryptocurrency market remains resilient to the conflict with consistent outperformance of traditional safe haven assets, gold and silver, since early February.
Bitcoin has surpassed $72,000 twice this month, each time followed by a sell-off that sent prices to between $67,000 and $65,000.
Traders are opening short positions in this region, resulting in a disproportionate increase in open interest.
Parts of the altcoin market are outperforming bitcoin, with decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens LDO and ETHFI rising between 2.5% and 3.5% since midnight.
Derivatives positioning
- Industry-wide crypto futures open interest (OI) rose to a one-week high of $112 billion.
- The top 10 tokens, including BTC and ETH, saw increases of 4% or more in futures open interest in the last 24 hours.
- Ether OI jumped to 14.55 million ETH, the most since August 24. This, along with positive funding rates and a cumulative volume delta, points to growing demand for bullish bets or long positions.
- DOGE and ZEC are other notable tokens with OI increases of over 10% in 24 hours.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, fell for the third day in a row, approaching the weekly low of 53%, indicating a fading geopolitical risk premium. Ether volatility is also decreasing.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH selling biases continue to weaken, although overall prices still show bearish concerns across all timeframes.
- Friday’s multi-billion dollar expiry points to $75,000 as the potential magnet. Peak pain theory suggests a potential rebound toward that level.
symbolic talk
- The CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) is the best-performing benchmark on Wednesday, up 1.9%. The bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 20 (CD20) gained 0.9% over the same period.
- The CPUS index is made up of AI TAO and FET tokens, as well as chainlink. which represents 62% of the index weighting.
- LINK rose 1.5%, while TAO and FET rose 4.9% and 2.9%, respectively.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator remains at 48/100, in bullish territory after spending much of February languishing around 22/100.
- On the other hand, privacy coins XMR and ZEC fell, losing around 1% each, as traders rotated between altcoin sectors to position themselves ahead of a possible breakout.
