The crypto market remained volatile on Friday with bitcoin after spending the past seven days between $88,000 and $94,000 in a week dominated by the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates by 25 basis points.
Interest rate cuts are typically seen as bullish catalysts for risk assets like bitcoin, as investors are less incentivized to hold fiat currencies like the dollar and thus look for returns elsewhere.
But neither bitcoin nor the broader crypto market behaved as expected, with BTC falling below $90,000 after the cut before rising back to the upper side of the range. The CoinDesk 20 Index is up 0.57% since midnight UTC.
Altcoin market remains relatively weak as several tokens including , and has faced double-digit declines this week.
Derivatives positioning
- BTC’s 30-day implied volatility, represented by Volmex’s BVIV index, continues to decline, falling to its lowest since November 10. Traders seem to anticipate choppy price action in the final weeks of 2025.
- The Ether Volatility Index has fallen to its lowest since late October.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH bias remains intact across all timeframes.
- Blockstreams showed a calendar span bias in BTC and ETH.
- In the futures market, ZEC open interest (OI) has increased by 16% to 2.28 million ZEC, approaching the record high of 2.32 million ZEC.
- HYPE, SUI and SOL have also seen notable increases in OI over 24 hours, indicating renewed capital inflows. OI has largely stuck with BTC and ETH.
Token talk
- Privacy coins continue to be the best in the altcoin market like zcash led the way with a 9% gain over the past 24 hours.
- There were also notable intraday recoveries for AAVE, HYPE and LIDO, but performance over the past week remains muted.
- CoinMarketCap’s “altcoin season” indicator is now at a cycle low of 16/100, a sign that traders are refusing to turn to the speculative altcoin market.
- The chronic underperformance is demonstrated by CoinDesk’s Memecoin Index (CDMEME), which is down 59% year-to-date, in contrast to the CoinDesk 10 (CD10), which has lost 7.3%.
- The demise of the memecoin market, once the bedrock of hype-driven crypto speculation, indicates a change in investor profile behavior over the past year.
- While the market used to be dominated by retail investors, the rise of ETFs and digital asset treasury (DAT) companies has sidelined this demand; replace it with slow and steady price action.
