The crypto market showed signs of optimism during the Asia session on Monday with bitcoin rising above $92,000 after spending the weekend trapped in a narrow range below $90,000.
The largest cryptocurrency has now reversed Friday’s selloff and is within striking distance of last week’s high of $94,200.
U.S. stock index futures also gave a boost from Sunday night’s open, rising about 0.2% as the market anticipated a rate cut by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, with a 25-basis-point cut probability of about 87%, according to CME data.
While bitcoin and ether is up 3%-4% over the past 24 hours, the altcoin market remains weak with a lack of speculative catalysts driving the action.
Derivatives positioning
- BTC’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, is holding steady at around 50%, showing no signs of panic ahead of the impending Fed decision.
- ASTER and ENA lead open interest growth in futures linked to the main tokens.
- Perpetual funding rates for major tokens, including BTC and ETH, remain positive, indicating a bullish leveraged betting bias.
- However, the positive bias may partly be due to the settlement of cash and carry arbitrage’s short futures legs.
- On Deribit, bitcoin and ether puts continue to trade more expensive than calls, a sign of continued downside fears.
- In BTC’s case, the $20,000 put is the second most popular option in the June 2026 expiration options.
- Block streams contained demand for BTC call spreads and chokes. In ETH’s case, call calendar spreads have dominated the 24-hour flow.
Token talk
- The “Altcoin Season” indicator fell to an all-time low of 19/100 on Monday, highlighting how investors are refusing to speculate in tokens other than the market leaders after a grueling selloff over the past few months.
- This behavior is also demonstrated by comparing the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index with the CoinDesk 80 (CD80), the latter of which includes a broader basket of altcoins.
- CD20 is up 1.34% since December 1st, while CD80 lost 1.37%.
- The memecoin and metaverse indices are the worst performing sectors for the year, down 53% and 62% respectively. It seems that the market has moved on from viral memes and non-fungible tokens for comic book characters (NFTs).
- One sector that continues to perform well is the privacy coin, zcash has made the most of the top 100 crypto tokens over the past 24 hours, rising 17% to compound a 600% year-to-date rally.
- The same cannot be said about the original symbol of its namesake data availability blockchain, which has lost more than 87% of its value this year after a lack of activity and a recent round of layoffs.
