The cryptocurrency market remained depressed on Wednesday as it grappled with a key support level after bitcoin. it failed to surpass $83,000 last week.
The largest cryptocurrency recently changed hands at $77,400 after adding 0.7% since midnight UTC. The move comes after a 5% loss over the past week.
Ether (ETH) outperformed bitcoin, gaining 1% to $2,130, but the overall altcoin market remains mixed; CHZ, TON, and ATOM lost 1% to 3%, while DASH, STRK, and PYTH rose 5%.
U.S. stocks fell on Tuesday following a sell-off in the bond market, and investors now keep a cautious eye on Nvidia’s (NVDA) earnings, due after the closing bell on Wednesday.
Derivatives positioning
- Cryptocurrency futures activity cooled across the market, with 24-hour volume falling 29% to $142.76 billion. Open interest (OI) remained stable at around $127 billion, and liquidations declined for the second day to $153 million, down 47%.
- The accumulated open interest in dollar- and USDT-denominated bitcoin futures on major exchanges fell to 257,000 BTC, while the global OI count for bitcoin futures fell just 1,000 BTC to 744,000 BTC. The declines suggest that some traders are reducing exposure as the price rises rather than increasing their positions.
- For XRP, the story is different. Open interest has increased more than 5% to 2.15 billion XRP, the most since October 11, and the spot price has increased in parallel, a combination that usually points to confirmation of a trend. However, a caveat is worth noting. XRP’s 24-hour cumulative volume delta is the second most negative among major coins, suggesting that sellers may be leading the price action through aggressive market orders rather than passive limit orders. This could indicate that some traders are shorting the bounce, perhaps anticipating that it will not hold.
- Zcash (ZEC) remains among the top open interest gainers for the third day in a row, with the tally rising to 2.27 million tokens as its price recovered to $586 from Saturday’s low of $486.60. The price chart shows a golden crossover of the 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages, a sign typically associated with long-term bullish momentum.
- The Ether (ETH) market is heating up again, with open interest once again surpassing 15 million tokens and approaching the May 16 record of 15.52 million. Positive funding rates and a negative 24-hour cumulative volume delta present a mixed picture, making it difficult to draw a clear conclusion on who is driving the price action.
- Hyperliquid’s HYPE stands out with an annualized funding rate of -36.85%, pointing to a growing bias towards short positions even as the token trades at $48.85, its highest level since October 30. Negative financing coupled with a rising spot price may suggest that some traders are shorting futures as a hedge against long spot positions rather than expressing an overtly bearish view.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum implied volatility indices remain near year-to-date lows, suggesting the market is relatively calm despite rising volatility in the US Treasury markets.
- Deribit noted that bitcoin volatility looks cheap and suggested that long positions could be a preferred option in the short term, a bet on a significant price movement in either direction rather than a directional call.
- Block trades featured bitcoin put ratio spreads and ether buy ratio spreads.
symbolic talk
- Wednesday’s top-performing altcoin is XDC, the native token of its eponymous layer 1 blockchain, created to support the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). It is up around 12% since midnight thanks to a 44% increase in daily trading volume.
- The DASH privacy token also fared better, rising 10% in the last 24 hours to form a clear uptrend since early April, characterized by two successive highs along with two higher lows.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator has a reading of 34/100 after falling from last week’s high of 50/100.
