Crypto market in good mood after bitcoin It surpassed $80,000 during the Asian morning on Tuesday.
BTC is currently trading at $80,690 and is up over 1% since midnight UTC. Meanwhile, Ether (ETH) is at $2,370 after it failed to surpass the April high of $2,460.
U.S. stocks rose in premarket trading, with Nasdaq 100 futures and S&P 500 futures rising 0.5% and 0.3% respectively on Tuesday, boosted by investors who bought the dip after Monday’s jitters over the Strait of Hormuz.
Precious metals gold and silver also rose on Tuesday, but remain significantly lower than the speculative hit in early March.
Derivatives positioning
- Cardano ADA-linked futures are seeing record participation. Open interest (OI), the total number of active futures contracts, has increased more than 18% to 2.17 billion tokens, surpassing the previous peak in January.
- Despite this accumulation, the positioning in ADA does not seem excessively overheated. Perpetual funding rates sit at 9% annualized, indicating bullish sentiment but not extreme leverage. Meanwhile, ADA has recorded one of the highest cumulative volume deltas (CVD) in the last 24 hours among major tokens. It means that buyers are driving trading activity by placing more market orders than sellers, rather than using passive limit orders.
- TON is another standout. Open interest has increased by 40% to a record 200.2 million tokens. It also shows the strongest CVD among the top 30 cryptocurrencies, pointing to aggressive buying pressure. However, funding rates remain slightly negative, an unusual combination. This suggests more nuanced positioning: traders may be buying TON on the spot market while also shorting futures to hedge, rather than purely speculative long positioning.
- There is a broader caution sign. Despite bitcoin’s breakout above $80,000, the OI-adjusted 24-hour CVD is negative for bitcoin and most major tokens, with the exception of ADA, TON, and M. This indicates that the rally is not strongly supported by aggressive derivatives buying, raising the risk that price gains may lack follow-through if spot demand weakens.
- Taking a closer look at bitcoin, its open interest has increased by around 3% to 785,000 BTC, approaching the recent record near 800,000 BTC. By contrast, derivatives activity in ether, XRP and solana has been relatively quiet over the past 24 hours, suggesting a more selective market rather than a broad altcoin expansion.
- Volatility is also starting to stir. Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index (BVIV) jumped 5% on Monday to climb back above 40%, the steepest one-day increase since mid-March. This rally from multi-month lows is worth watching closely. A continued rise in implied volatility may indicate growing hedging demand or expectations of larger price swings and, in some cases, may coincide with risk aversion and recovery of recent gains. However, the equivalent measure of Ether (EVIV) has yet to show a similar rally.
- In traditional markets there are also early signs of demand for hedging. Comments on social media point to heavy buying of call options on the VIX, Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” which typically moves inversely to the S&P 500.
- Options markets on Deribit show that risk reversals for both bitcoin and ether remain skewed toward puts with different maturities. This means that downside protection is still valued at a premium relative to upside exposure. Rather than an overtly bearish attitude, this probably reflects a change in market structure: institutions are playing a larger role and tend to systematically hedge downside risk or generate returns by selling call options. The result is a less euphoric and more hedged market than in previous crypto cycles.
symbolic talk
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) is the best-performing benchmark on Tuesday, up 2.7% since midnight UTC after ethena (ENA) and ONDO rose 6.8% and 3.7% respectively.
- CoinDesk 5 (CD5) is performing the worst, notching a 0.5% gain, as investors appear to be pivoting toward more speculative bets instead of major cryptocurrencies.
- CoinMarketCap’s altcoin seasonal indicator is at 41/100, showing neutral but warm sentiment towards the sector following a multi-month bearish trend.
- Toncoin (TON) is the best-performing altcoin among the CoinDesk 100 (CD100), rising 8.1% since midnight UTC and 28% in the last 24 hours following an announcement from Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who said that Telegram will replace the Ton Foundation as the driving force behind the network.
