Bitcoin consolidated after Monday’s sell-off, trading at $62,600 after falling from $64,400 to $61,800 in 24 hours.
Ether (ETH) tracked the major cryptocurrency, trading in a relatively tight range of $1,770-$1,790. Trading volume across ETH pairs rose 2.2% to $8.95 billion over the past 24 hours, suggesting a healthy balance between buyers and sellers rather than resistance to apathy.
Lighter (LIT) bounced back from Monday’s slump, up 5.7% since midnight UTC as it looks to stage another rally after a 200% gain since May.
U.S. stocks were mixed, with Nasdaq 100 index futures adding 0.31% while S&P 500 index futures fell 0.12%, reflecting uncertainty after U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran would be hit by “very heavy” strikes on Tuesday.
Gold extended its decline from January’s record high to languish around $4,020 a barrel. ounces, down about 28% since January 29.
Derivatives positioning
- Bitcoin derivatives positioning remains largely unchanged. Open interest (OI) held at $17.1 billion; 3-month y/y remained at 3.8%; and annualized funding rates ran between 0%-8% across multiple venues – with Bybit’s previous negative outlier now brought into line.
- No meaningful leverage was added in either direction and no stress signals emerged in the funding structure.
- Option positioning remains call oriented but continues to moderate. The 24-hour call/put ratio stands at 58/42, softer than yesterday’s 64/36, and the one-week delta skew has further compressed to ~15% from 26% a week ago.
- The at-the-money futures structure remains in contango (front end ~31-32%, long end ~43%), and Deribit’s implied volatility index, DVOL, of 37.43 is near a multi-year low. Low-stress, mild call bias, but the option premium is slowly disappearing.
- Coinglass data shows $283 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 74-26 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($66 million) and ETH ($50 million) led the way in fictitious liquidations.
- The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $61,300 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price drop.
Token talk
- Athena (ENA) mirrored LIT’s rise on Tuesday, rising 5.7% to lead the altcoin market. However, unlike LIT, ENA is in a deep downtrend dating back to September, since then it has lost more than 90% of its value.
- There were also encouraging signs in the AI sector on Tuesday, with NEAR up 3.3% and FET up 1.7%.
- JUP and WLFI continued to show weakness due to dwindling trading volume, falling 1.5% and 0.5% respectively.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator paints a more positive picture with a reading of 54/100. It spent most of June below 50/100.
- A potentially bullish driver for altcoin price action could be the deep selloff in South Korea’s stock market. The benchmark KOSPI index has fallen 10% since Friday, leading to an inverse correlation with the country’s crypto exchanges.
- Wu Blockchain reported that Upbit trading volume increased by 1,426% following KOSPI’s plight, indicating a potential relaxation of machine chip trading that saw investors abandon crypto late last year.
