Bitcoin rose 1.2% after midnight UTC, reflecting gains in U.S. stocks, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 1% over the same period.
The progress follows oil’s retreat below $100 per barrel. barrel on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump proposed a “15-point plan” to end the war in Iran, although Iranian officials dismissed Trump’s statement as fake news.
The crypto market remains resilient to the conflict, consistently outperforming traditional havens gold and silver since early February.
Bitcoin has risen above $72,000 twice this month, each time followed by a selloff that sent prices to between $67,000 and $65,000.
Traders open short positions in this region, resulting in a disproportionate increase in open interest.
Parts of the altcoin market are outperforming bitcoin, with decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens LDO and ETHFI up between 2.5% and 3.5% since midnight.
Derivatives positioning
- Industry-wide crypto futures open interest (OI) rose to a one-week high of $112 billion.
- The top 10 tokens, including BTC and ETH, all recorded increases of 4% or more in futures open interest in the past 24 hours.
- Ether OI jumped to 14.55 million ETH, the highest level since August 24. This, combined with positive funding rates and cumulative volume delta, points to increasing demand for bullish bets or longs.
- DOGE and ZEC are other outstanding tokens with OI increases of over 10% in 24 hours.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, fell for a third day in a row, approaching a weekly low of 53% to indicate a fading geopolitical risk premium. Ether’s volatility is also decreasing.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH’s set biases continue to weaken, although overall pricing still shows downside concerns across all tenors.
- Friday’s multi-billion dollar expiration points to $75,000 as the potential magnet. The theory of maximum pain suggests a potential jump towards that level.
Token talk
- The CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) is the best-performing benchmark on Wednesday, up 1.9%. The bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 20 (CD20) rose 0.9% in the same period.
- The CPUS index consists of AI tokens TAO and FET as well as chainlink which makes up 62% of the index weighting.
- LINK is up 1.5%, while TAO and FET are up 4.9% and 2.9% respectively.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator remains at 48/100, in bullish territory after spending much of February languishing at around 22/100.
- On the flip side, privacy coins XMR and ZEC fell, losing around 1% each as traders rotated between altcoin sectors to position themselves ahead of a potential breakout.
