The crypto market fell on Thursday, with bitcoin losing 0.7% since midnight UTC to recently trade at $77,600.
The drop comes after the largest cryptocurrency hit its highest point since January on Wednesday before sellers intervened just below the $80,000 resistance level.
Oil prices rose 1.5% to $103 a barrel overnight following reports that the United States had seized three Iranian oil tankers in Asian waters, leading to a drop in risk asset prices.
Ether (ETH) lost 2.5% and is now trading at $2,320 after testing $2,500 over the weekend.
The broader market remains bullish, and Bitcoin appears to have broken out of a two-month range higher. It had languished between $63,000 and $75,000 since early February.
US stock futures fell on Thursday, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq 500 futures losing 0.5% each overnight.
Derivatives positioning
- While bitcoin futures open interest (OI) fell to 775,000 BTC from a record near 800,000 BTC on Wednesday, it remains at historically high levels. Negative perpetual funding rates suggest that leveraged bets remain tilted to the bearish side.
- This combination is rare. As a result, some analysts are calling BTC’s current rally the “most hated” rally, suggesting it could accelerate if bearish traders are forced to unwind their positions.
- Open interest in DOGE has surpassed 14 billion tokens, a level seen only once since October. However, the token’s funding rates are skewed positive, suggesting growing demand for bullish bets.
- BCH, LINK and LTC are other coins with a decreasing OI indicating an outflow of capital from the market.
- The cumulative volume delta (CVD) indicates caution and shows that more trades have been initiated in the last 24 hours by sellers raising bids than buyers raising bids on most major altcoins, including XRP, SOL, and ETH. Meanwhile, BTC, M, and CRO are the only assets with positive CVD readings. This suggests that the broader market is not yet fully participating in the bitcoin rally.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum 30-day implied volatility indices continue to hold steady around the 2.5-month lows reached recently. In other words, calm prevails even as US-Iran ceasefire talks go nowhere and oil markets remain unsettled.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH put options remain more expensive than call options, in a sign of persistent bearish concerns. Over the last 24 hours, demand has been concentrated in BTC call options, bullish bets, with strike prices between $80,000 and $85,000.
symbolic talk
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) is the worst-performing benchmark on Thursday, having lost 2.7% since midnight UTC, while the bitcoin-dominant CoinDesk 20 (CD20) is down 1.1%.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” index fell to 32/100 on Thursday, its lowest level in 10 days, as investors showed a preference for bitcoin after Wednesday’s attempt to break $80,000.
- One token to counter Thursday’s bearish price action was Spark (SPK), which surged more than 70% after listing on Upbit, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
- Privacy coin monero (XMR) is up 3.3% as of midnight, outperforming peers DASH and ZEC, both of which are in the red.
- DeFi tokens morpho and aave led the sector’s downward movement, losing 4.6% and 2.8%, respectively, as negative sentiment continues to plague the industry following the $290 million KelpDAO exploit over the weekend.
