Bitcoin added as much as 0.4% since midnight UTC on Friday and was recently just 0.07% higher after falling to its lowest level since early April the previous day.
Thursday’s drop extended a slide that has emerged over the past three weeks after a failed attempt to climb above $83,000. There is now a chance that the rejection will have contributed to a series of lower highs going back to October – a key characteristic of a bear market.
Ether (ETH) tracked bitcoin. It fell to $1,965 on Thursday before staging a rally back above $2,000.
US stocks continued to outperform the crypto market on Friday, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 index futures both posting 0.15% gains as stock targets neared new record highs.
There is no clear explanation as to why the crypto market struggles against sectors it has historically been correlated with. However, the divergence since early October is consistent with a deleveraging of leverage that the market has failed to recover from.
Derivatives positioning
- BTC open interest stands at $20.05 billion, up from $19.7 billion a week ago, with speculative positioning showing little growth.
- Funding rates remain positive across multiple venues at less than 10% annually. The exception is Deribit, where they rose to 44%.
- The three-month annualized basis moved closer to 3%, led by Deribit, up from 2.2% last week, pointing to a mild improvement in institutional risk appetite.
- Options positioning is showing mixed signals: the one-week 25-delta bias ticked up to 12.85% from 12.4%, suggesting slightly greater demand for downside protection.
- Front-end implied vol (DVOL) compressed to around 36 – the lowest since September – while 1-month structural slope is at -6%, keeping the curve in contango. Markets are pricing in short-term calm alongside longer-term uncertainty.
- Coinglass data shows $224 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 54-46 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($46 million) and ETH ($43 million) led the way in fictitious liquidations. The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $72,280 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price drop.
Token talk
- Stellar (XLM) was the best performing altcoin on Friday, rising 25% in the last 24 hours and 4.5% since midnight UTC after it was announced that The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) plans to connect its tokenized securities platform to the network.
- There were also double-digit gains for ALGO, INJ, HBAR and HYPE over the past 24 hours as the altcoin market showed strength while the major cryptocurrencies showed weakness.
- One asset that continued its dismal performance of late was . The token, which emerged from a Bitcoin fork in late 2017, lost 7.2% of its value in the last 24 hours and is now down 20% in the past week alone.
- DeFi tokens are also losing their luster, with ENA, JUP and UNI falling as much as 18% over the past week.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator reflected the weakness on Friday, falling to 34/100 from 37/100.
