The cryptocurrency market remains under pressure ahead of key US inflation data, which is expected to show the cost of living rose to a three-year high of more than 4% in May.
Tokens such as privacy-focused zcash (ZEC) and decentralized exchange Hyperliquid’s HYPE have each fallen more than 10% in 24 hours, a sign of risk aversion in the broader market. ADA, ONDO and BCH are other losers, down more than 4%. The CoinDesk 20 index fell 3% in the period.
bitcoin has retreated to below $61,500, almost reversing Sunday’s bounce that sent prices above $64,000 on some exchanges. More importantly, the cryptocurrency is trading below its 200-week simple moving average (SMA), a technical line widely watched by traders.
“The history of the 200-week moving average over the past 11 years (before this, the market had not fallen below it) shows that the average time spent near it is almost 11 months, suggesting a very long bear market,” Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email.
Derivatives positioning
- Cryptocurrency futures volume in the last 24 hours increased 1.2% to $193 billion, while open interest fell 1.5% to $102.27 billion. Liquidations, by contrast, rose 38% to $418 million, with long positions accounting for more than $300 million of the total, while bitcoin fell again to $61,000 yesterday.
- Bitcoin futures open interest (OI) rose to 728,000 BTC from 712,000 BTC even as the cryptocurrency’s price fell. Rising OI on a price drop points to new short positioning, a sign that traders are positioning for a new drop.
- That conclusion is reinforced by negative perpetual funding rates and a negative OI-adjusted 24-hour cumulative volume delta, the latter indicating that sellers are bidding at the market rather than placing passive limit orders.
- Solana OI futures rose to 69.58 million tokens, up almost 2% on the day, approaching the June 5 record peak of 71.57 million. Funding rates and CVDs are negative, reflecting bitcoin’s bearish setup.
- The bearish inclination extends to all areas. Funding rates and CVDs are negative for most major coins, including ether (ETH) and XRP. The only exception is XMR, whose 24-hour CVD is closely positive.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index is 51.21%, up from 45.8% on Monday, reflecting renewed uncertainty ahead of the US CPI release later today. The ETH Implied Volatility Index has also risen.
- On Deribit, short-term put options for both BTC and ETH continue to command a notable premium over call options, a sign that short-covering demand remains high. One-week implied volatility is trading cheap relative to one-week realized volatility, a setup that favors options buyers.
- In the block flows, a long butterfly was structured on the July 31 expiration, involving long positions on the call at the $70,000 and $80,000 strike prices and short 2x on the $75,000 call. The trade will benefit if BTC consolidates around $75,000 through the end of July, implying that the desk behind the position sees limited directional conviction from here.
symbolic talk
- Uniswap V4’s total value locked (TVL), the deposits located within a protocol, appeared to explode more than 350% in one day, with DefiLlama showing approximately $2 billion of apparent inflows concentrated on the BNB chain. The jump was large enough to appear to be a major migration of liquidity to the exchange.
- However, that was not the case. The figure was not a wave of capital flowing into the protocol. CoinDesk traced the spike to Humanity Protocol’s H token, which was hacked and minted in unlimited supply a day earlier. The new worthless tokens were in a BNB Chain pool and inflated the board’s dollar reading rather than representing actual deposits. The founder of DefiLlama was contacted to confirm this.
- Santiment, a behavioral analytics platform, said the overall market sell-off has reached a historic buy zone.
- The 30-day market value to realized value (MVRV), an indicator of the average profit or loss for traders who bought a token over the last month, shows that the typical recent buyer is immersed in bitcoin by 10%, ether by 12%, chainlink by 9%, XRP by 8%, and cardano by about 18%. The company labels the first four as a “fair buy” and Cardano as a “strong buy.”
- jumped 12% in 24 hours after the on-chain lending protocol raised $175 million, one of the largest funding rounds in DeFi history, co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit Capital with backers including Apollo and VanEck.
- The deal, structured as a symbolic purchase, valued the protocol at up to $2 billion. Later, the token returned some of the pop.
