Bitcoin traded at $69,500 by mid-morning in Europe after giving up Tuesday’s gains following a rejection of $71,750.
The biggest cryptocurrency fell 0.55% since midnight UTC, a loss that was exceeded by several altcoins, with zcash (ZEC) and aave decreased by 4.5% and 2.1% respectively.
Gold and the dollar were little changed, while US stock index futures added 0.15%.
Price action remains dictated by the US-Israel war with Iran, which continues to rage even after conflicting comments from US President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
Oil remained volatile as a result, falling to as low as $81 a barrel. barrel on Tuesday before rising back to $89 during the European session on Wednesday.
Derivatives positioning
- Bitcoin’s inability to build momentum above $70,000 has proved costly for bulls with leveraged long bets. Over the past 24 hours, over $220 million worth of crypto futures bets have been liquidated, with longs accounting for most of the figure.
- Open interest (OI) in dollar-denominated bitcoin futures on major exchanges has fallen to 226,000 BTC from 233,000 BTC. This indicates that the day-to-day price drop has not really caused traders to short the falling market. The same dynamic is seen in solana (SOL) and ether (ETH) futures.
- Activity in XRP futures continues to grow, with open interest rising to 1.74 billion tokens, the highest since February 23rd.
- Overall, OI has fallen in most alternative tokens over the past 24 hours, a sign of renewed capital outflows.
- TRX, CC and XMR stand out with a bullish combination of positive annualized funding rates and cumulative volume delta (CVD), indicating active buying in the futures market. Most other coins have flat to negative funding rates and CVDs.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, fell for a third day in a row, but its key averages — the 50-, 100-, and 200-day measures — are now stacked on top of each other. It is a bullish signal, which means that volatility may increase.
- The same applies to the ether volatility index. In addition, Wall Street’s VIX index is up 4% to 26%, pointing to heightened volatility in stocks that could spill over into cryptocurrencies.
- On the CME, open interest in BTC futures has fallen to $7.39 billion, the lowest since September 2024, along with an equally sharp drop in ETH futures. Clearly, the institutional appetite for the two tokens remains weak.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH protective puts continue to trade more expensive than calls, although demand for downside protection has weakened significantly since the beginning of last month. On decentralized exchange Derive, traders are increasingly betting on a rally above $80,000, alongside selling on Deribit, Derive told CoinDesk.
Token talk
- AI token internet computer (ICP) led a mixed altcoin sector on Wednesday, rising more than 8% after it listed on Korean exchange Upbit. Daily trading volume rose from $65 million to $267 million after the IPO as retail investors poured in.
- Continuing the AI theme, jumped, gaining 6% over the past 24 hours.
- AI’s positive performance can be attributed in part to a rare blog post by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who argued that AI is an industrial construct comparable to electrification.
- The rest of the altcoin market retreated on Wednesday, with decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens curve (CRV) and jupiter (JUP) losing 6.5% each in the past 24 hours.
- Crypto sentiment is slowly improving as the Fear and Greed Index is at 25/100, moving into “fear” territory after more than a month stuck in the “extreme fear” zone.
- The increase comes as a result of the relative strength of the crypto market since the start of the war in Iran, with bitcoin and the broader market outperforming precious metals and US stocks since 1 March.
