BTC price holds gains but lacks conviction as derivatives signal caution

The crypto market ticked higher on Friday. Bitcoin BTC$77,264.30 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 on Wednesday, a price it had previously struggled to climb above. It has now been trapped between $75,000 and $80,000 since April 19. Negative funding rates on futures exchanges indicate that traders are generally positioned for a decline.

US stock index futures were little changed. Nasdaq 100 futures cooled after the week’s Big Tech earnings, 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 a mixed bag; AXS and HYPE rose by around 3%, but DeFi tokens MORPHO and AAVE are both in the red.

Derivatives positioning

• Open interest in bitcoin futures is at $19 billion, largely unchanged week-over-week, with speculative activity showing little conviction.
• Funding rates are largely negative across multiple venues at around -2% y-o-y, except at Deribit which saw an increase to 37%. The three-month annual basis stands at 1.5%, also weekly, pointing to continued institutional caution.
• Options sentiment is leaning bullish: put/call volume over the past 24 hours is 58% in favor of calls, and one-week delta bias has eased to 8.6% from 9.5%, indicating moderating demand for downside protection.
• The implied volatility structure is in contango, with the front-end around 29% rising to ~45% at the March ’27 tenor, suggesting that the market is pricing longer-term uncertainty over immediate tail risk.
• CoinGlass data shows $149 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 30-70 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($50 million) and ETH ($29 million) led in terms of notional liquidations.
• The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $75,400 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price drop.

Token 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 flat despite broader market optimism.
• Monad (MON) led the altcoin market on Friday, rising 6.7% over 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 about WLFI$0.05701The DeFi token linked to President Donald Trump’s family. It fell more than 2.6% since midnight following a government vote on token lock-ups. It has now lost more than 77% since it was introduced in September.
• CoinDesk’s Overnight Rate (CDOR), which tracks lending and borrowing rates on Aave, has returned to normal market conditions following the KelpDAO hack, a sign of strength in the DeFi sector.