The cryptocurrency market rose on Friday. bitcoin rose 1.25% since midnight UTC to trade at $77,250, and the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) added 0.7% with 14 members in the green.
The rise comes after bitcoin found support at $75,000, a price it had previously found difficult to overcome, on Wednesday. It has now been stuck between $75,000 and $80,000 since April 19. Negative funding rates on futures exchanges indicate that traders are generally positioned for a decline.
U.S. stock index futures were little changed. Nasdaq 100 futures cooled after Big Tech’s weekly gains, while S&P 500 futures are marginally in the black, up 5 points.
Precious metals fell, with gold and silver losing 1% and 0.7%, respectively, and the altcoin market is mixed; AXS and HYPE are up around 3%, but DeFi tokens MORPHO and AAVE are in the red.
Derivatives positioning
- Open interest in bitcoin futures remains at $19 billion, virtually unchanged week over week, with speculative activity showing little conviction.
- Funding rates are broadly negative in multiple locations, around -2% annualized, except at Deribit which saw an increase to 37%. The three-month annualized base stands at 1.5%, also stable in the week, which points to continued institutional caution.
- Options sentiment is leaning bullish: Call/sell volume over the past 24 hours is 58% in favor of calls, and the one-week delta bias has narrowed from 9.5% to 8.6%, indicating moderate demand for downside protection.
- The implied volatility term structure is in contango, with the front end of around 29% rising to ~45% at the March 27 term, suggesting the market is pricing in longer-term uncertainty rather than immediate tail risk.
- CoinGlass data shows $149 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 30-70 split between long and short positions. BTC ($50 million) and ETH ($29 million) led in terms of notional settlements.
- The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $75,400 as the central liquidation level to monitor in case of a price drop.
symbolic talk
- The CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) was the best-performing benchmark, up 1.8%, followed by the CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS), which added 1.4%.
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) lagged its peers and was recently unchanged despite broader market optimism.
- Monad (MON) led the altcoin market on Friday, rising 6.7% in 24 hours. There were also notable gains for PENDLE, RAY and TAO, all up between 4.2% and 5.35%.
- The same cannot be said of the DeFi token linked to President Donald Trump’s family. That fell more than 2.6% since midnight following a governance vote on symbolic lockdowns. It has now lost more than 77% since its introduction in September.
- CoinDesk Overnight Rate (CDOR), which tracks borrowing and borrowing rates on Aave, has returned to normal market conditions after the KelpDAO hack, a sign of strength in the DeFi sector.
