bitcoin was trading at $69,500 mid-morning in Europe after giving up Tuesday’s gains following a rejection at $71,750.
The largest cryptocurrency fell 0.55% as of midnight UTC, a loss eclipsed by several altcoins, with zcash (ZEC) and aave. falling 4.5% and 2.1%, respectively.
Gold and the dollar were little changed, while US stock index futures added 0.15%.
Price action continues to be dictated by the US-Israel war with Iran, which continues to rage even after US President Donald Trump’s contradictory comments on Tuesday.
As a result, oil remained volatile, falling to a low of $81 a barrel on Tuesday before recovering to $89 during the European session on Wednesday.
Derivatives positioning
- Bitcoin’s failure to build momentum above $70,000 has proven costly for bulls holding leveraged long bets. Over $220 million worth of crypto futures bets have been liquidated in the last 24 hours, with long positions accounting for the majority of the total.
- Open interest (OI) in dollar-denominated bitcoin futures on major exchanges has decreased from 233,000 BTC to 226,000 BTC. This indicates that the overnight price drop has not really caused traders to short the falling market. The same dynamic is observed in solana (SOL) and ether (ETH) futures.
- Activity in XRP futures continues to grow, with open interest rising to 1.74 billion tokens, the highest level since February 23.
- Generally speaking, OI has decreased on most alt tokens over the past 24 hours, a sign of fresh capital outflows.
- TRX, CC and XMR stand out with a bullish combination of positive annualized funding rates and cumulative volume delta (CVD), pointing to active buying in the futures market. Most other currencies have stable to negative funding rates and CVD.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, fell for the third day in a row, but its major averages (the 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day measures) are now stacked on top of each other. That’s a bullish signal, meaning volatility could increase.
- The same goes for the ether volatility index. Additionally, Wall Street’s VIX index has risen 4% to 26%, pointing to elevated volatility in stocks that could spill over to cryptocurrencies.
- On the CME, open interest in BTC futures has fallen to $7.39 billion, the lowest since September 2024, along with an equally steep drop in ETH futures. Clearly, institutional appetite for the two tokens remains weak.
- On Deribit, protective puts on BTC and ETH remain more expensive than calls, although demand for downside protection has weakened noticeably since early last month. On decentralized exchange Derive, traders are increasingly betting on a rally above $80,000, along with selling options on Deribit, Derive told CoinDesk.
symbolic talk
- AI Token Internet Computer (ICP) led a mixed sector of altcoins on Wednesday, rising more than 8% after its listing on the Korean exchange Upbit. Daily trading volume jumped from $65 million to $267 million post-listing as retail investors flocked.
- Continuing with the topic of AI, jumped, recording a 6% gain in the last 24 hours.
- The positive performance of AI can be partly attributed to a rare blog post by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who stated that AI is an industrial development comparable to electrification.
- The rest of the altcoin market retreated on Wednesday, with decentralized finance (DeFi) token Curve (CRV) and Jupiter (JUP) losing 6.5% each in the last 24 hours.
- Crypto sentiment is slowly improving as the Fear and Greed index is at 25/100, entering “fear” territory after over a month stuck in the “extreme fear” zone.
- The rally is due to the relative strength of the cryptocurrency market since the start of the war in Iran, with bitcoin and the market in general. outperforming precious metals and US stocks since March 1st.
