bitcoin it is currently trading at around $71,000, having risen 0.25% since midnight UTC, adding to a broader 24-hour rally of 4%.
The Asian schedule was favorable for AI tokens, with bittensor (TAO) and adding 5.8% and 4.1% each. The increase followed comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who stated that artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term for AI that matches the cognitive abilities of humans, has already been achieved.
Even so, the main driver of the market remains the war in the Middle East after the new attacks on Tuesday in Tel Aviv and Lebanon. On Monday, US President Donald Trump said a 48-hour ultimatum over the Strait of Hormuz had been suspended following “good and productive” peace talks with Iran, although Iranian officials called it “fake news.”
Oil remains around $100 a barrel, while US stocks are in the red, with Nasdaq 100 futures and S&P 500 futures both down about 0.1% since midnight.
The cryptocurrency market has remained relatively resilient throughout the conflict, with bitcoin outperforming gold, a traditional safe haven asset, since the start of the war.
Derivatives positioning
- More than $550 million in leveraged crypto futures bets have been liquidated in 24 hours, with short or bearish bets taking most of the impact.
- Bitcon’s 4% 24-hour price rise is not supported by higher futures participation, as open interest (OI) in major USD and USDT-denominated futures has decreased to 228,000 BTC from 229,000 BTC.
- A similar pattern is seen in the ETH, XRP and SOL markets.
- DOGE, ADA, SUI, AVAX, LINK, and PAXG futures have seen open interest drop by up to 10%.
- Most tokens have seen aggressive bidding, as evidenced by their positive 24-hour cumulative volume deltas. CRO, XMR and TON stand out with negative CVD.
- Perpetual financing rates for large companies also paint a bullish picture, with values between 5% and 10%.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH puts continue to show a net bias towards protective puts across all time frames. However, they are now trading at a volatility premium of 5 to 6 points over calls, up from 8 to 10 early Monday.
- Block flows featured demand for the BTC selling condor, a directionally neutral strategy designed to benefit from low volatility. In the case of ETH, risk reversals dominated the flows.
symbolic talk
- Several altcoins have outperformed bitcoin since midnight, with HYPE, OP and CRV gaining around 3% as traders rotated into more speculative assets in anticipation of a broader market breakout.
- The bitcoin-dominant CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index rose 0.3% on Tuesday, while the altcoin-heavy CoinDesk 80 (CD80) rose more than 1%, indicating an improvement in sentiment among the altcoin sector.
- The caveat to the improving sentiment is the state of the DeFi industry. One market observer described the current landscape as a “really dark” period after Balancer Labs shut down operations and the Resolv stablecoin project was hacked. criticized the lack of performance opportunities added to the inherent risk that comes with the use of DeFi protocols.
- The memecoin sector is another that feels the tension. The CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) is the worst-performing benchmark on Tuesday, rising just 0.1% and several of the index’s components losing between 3% and 5%.
