Bitcoin traded at $76,600 Tuesday, down 0.8% since midnight UTC, as Monday’s brief jump to $77,800 fades. The move leaves the major cryptocurrency potentially making another lower high in a bearish structure that has been in place since October, down 7% over the past two weeks.
The weakness is not reflected in wider financial markets. S&P 500 index futures and Nasdaq 100 futures are up more than 0.5%, pointing to crypto-specific headwinds rather than macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures.
Ether (ETH) is worse. Trading at $2,098, ETH has fallen more than 10% over the past two weeks and sits firmly in the middle of the range carved out between February and April, with no signs of regaining lost ground.
The altcoin market is mixed with notable gains across AI tokens and steep losses for tokens that performed well earlier this year such as zcash (ZEC), which has lost around 7% since midnight.
Derivatives positioning
- The volume of the crypto futures market has fallen 10% to $130 billion in 24 hours. Nominal open interest (OI) is little changed around $126 billion and 24-hour liquidations are down 21% to $126 million. This points to a stable, fairly dull market environment after the extended US holiday weekend (although crypto is never closed).
- SHIB, LINK, HBAR, NEAR and TRX are big OI winners in the past 24 hours, while ZEC, XLM and HYPE are losers. The action indicates selective market positioning rather than broad-based capital spread across the altcoin universe.
- NEAR rallied 58% in the week ending May 24 and has since gained another 14% to $2.82, a level last seen in November. The rally, likely fueled by a series of upgrades involving dynamic scaling, privacy and quantum defenses, is accompanied by an influx of new money into derivatives. Open interest rose to a record 309 million tokens from 182 million a week ago.
- NEAR also has the most positive 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) among major tokens, a sign that buyers are setting the price action by trading market orders rather than passive limit orders. Funding rates are only marginally positive, a sign that the market is far from overheated. Together, these signal the potential for continued price gains.
- OI for futures in Chainlink’s LINK rose to 42.96 million tokens, the highest since February 7th. Annualized funding rates of around 8% point to futures trading above the spot price in a bullish sign for the oracle data provider.
- Bitcoin futures have cooled. OI in BTC has pulled back to 711K BTC from 793k BTC at the beginning of this month. ETH OI hovers just below record highs near 15 million ETH. BTC and ETH’s 30-day implied volatility indices continue to slide in a sign of continued volatility selling and no sign of panic demand for options.
- Still, on Deribit, BTC’s strikes from $70K to $76K are among the most traded in the last 24 hours. Puts represent a bearish bet that offers protection against price weakness in the underlying asset.
Token talk
- CoinDesk’s Computing Select Index (CPUS) was the best-performing benchmark on Tuesday, rising 1.9% since midnight UTC and 2.7% over the past 24 hours.
- The CPU is a basket of AI tokens and chain links. FET added 4.8% Tuesday and YIELD rose 7.2%.
- The DeFi Select Index (DFX) also outperformed the major crypto markets, rising 1.3%. The gains suggest investors are opting for more speculative bets as they wait for bitcoin and ether to resolve their current trading ranges.
- Privacy tokens weakened across the board as monero (XMR) and dash (DASH) trailed zcash (ZEC) lower by around 1.5% each.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is currently at 35/100, up from last week’s low of 31/100 and below the monthly high of 50/100.
