bitcoin traded at $76,600 on Tuesday, down 0.8% since midnight UTC, as Monday’s brief bounce to $77,800 fades. The move leaves the largest cryptocurrency potentially forming another lower high in a bearish structure that has been in place since October and is down 7% in the past two weeks.
The weakness is not reflected in broader financial markets. S&P 500 Index futures and Nasdaq 100 futures have gained more than 0.5%, pointing to cryptocurrency-specific headwinds rather than macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures.
Ether (ETH) is doing worse. Priced at $2,098, ETH has lost more than 10% over the past two weeks and sits firmly in the middle of the range it created between February and April, with no signs of regaining lost ground.
The altcoin market is mixed, with notable gains in AI tokens and heavy losses in tokens that performed well earlier in the year such as zcash (ZEC), which has lost around 7% since midnight.
Derivatives positioning
- Cryptocurrency futures market volume has fallen 10% to $130 billion in 24 hours. Notional open interest (OI) is little changed around $126 billion, and 24-hour settlements are down 21% to $126 million. This points to a stable and fairly dull market environment after the long weekend holiday in the US (although cryptocurrencies are never closed).
- SHIB, LINK, HBAR, NEAR and TRX are the top OI gainers in the last 24 hours, while ZEC, XLM and HYPE are losers. The move indicates selective market positioning rather than broad-based capital deployment across the altcoin universe.
- NEAR rose 58% in the week ending May 24 and has since gained an additional 14% to $2.82, a level last seen in November. The rally, likely driven by a series of improvements involving dynamic scaling, privacy and quantum defenses, is accompanied by an influx of new money into derivatives. Open interest jumped to a record 309 million tokens from 182 million a week ago.
- NEAR also has the most positive 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) among major tokens, a sign that buyers are setting price action by trading market orders rather than passive limit orders. Funding rates are only marginally positive, a sign that the market is far from overheated. Together, these indicators indicate potential for continued price increases.
- Chainlink’s LINK futures OI rose to 42.96 million tokens, the most since February 7. Annualized funding rates of around 8% point to futures trading above the spot price in a bullish sign for Oracle data provider.
- Bitcoin futures have cooled down. OI in BTC has retreated to 711,000 BTC from 793,000 BTC earlier this month. ETH OI sits just below all-time highs close to 15 million ETH. The BTC and ETH 30-day implied volatility indices continue to fall on a persistent volatility sell signal and there are no signs of panicked options demand.
- Still, on Deribit, BTC put options between $70,000 and $76,000 are among the most traded in the last 24 hours. Put options represent a bearish bet and offer protection against price weakness of the underlying asset.
symbolic talk
- CoinDesk’s Computing Select Index (CPUS) was the best-performing benchmark on Tuesday, rising 1.9% since midnight UTC and 2.7% over the past 24 hours.
- The CPUS is a basket of AI tokens and chain links. FET added 4.8% on Tuesday and RENDER rose 7.2%.
- The DeFi Select Index (DFX) also outperformed the major cryptocurrencies, rising 1.3%. The gain suggests investors are opting for more speculative bets as they wait for bitcoin and ether to resolve their current trading ranges.
- Privacy tokens weakened across the board as monero (XMR) and dash (DASH) followed zcash (ZEC) and fell around 1.5% each.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is currently at 35/100, above last week’s low of 31/100 and below the monthly high of 50/100.
