Bitcoin rose 1.2% after midnight UTC, reflecting gains in U.S. stocks, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 1% over the same period.
The advances follow oil falling below $100 a barrel on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump proposed a “15-point plan” to end the war in Iran, although Iranian officials dismissed Trump’s statement as fake news.
The crypto market remains resilient to conflict with consistent outperformance of traditional safe-haven assets, gold and silver, since early February.
Bitcoin topped $72,000 twice this month, each time followed by a selloff that sent prices up to between $67,000 and $65,000.
Traders are opening short positions in this region, leading to a disproportionate increase in open interest.
Parts of the altcoin market are outperforming bitcoin, with decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens LDO and ETHFI up 2.5% to 3.5% since midnight.
Positioning of derivative products
- Industry-wide crypto futures open interest (OI) hit a one-week high of $112 billion.
- The top 10 tokens, including BTC and ETH, all saw an increase of 4% or more in futures open interest over the past 24 hours.
- Ether OI surged to 14.55 million ETH, the highest since August 24. This, coupled with positive funding rates and cumulative volume delta, indicates increasing demand for bullish bets or long positions.
- DOGE and ZEC are other noteworthy tokens with OI increases of over 10% in 24 hours.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, fell for the third day in a row, closing in on the weekly low of 53%, indicating a diminishing geopolitical risk premium. The volatility of Ether is also decreasing.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH short biases continue to weaken, although overall prices still show downward concerns across all tenors.
- Friday’s multibillion-dollar expiration indicates that $75,000 could be a potential magnet. Peak pain theory suggests a potential rebound toward this level.
Symbolic discussion
- The CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) was the best-performing benchmark on Wednesday, up 1.9%. The bitcoin-rich CoinDesk 20 (CD20) gained 0.9% over the same period.
- The CPUS Index is comprised of AI TAO and FET tokens as well as Chainlink. which represents 62% of the index weighting.
- LINK is up 1.5% while TAO and FET are up 4.9% and 2.9% respectively.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator remains at 48/100, in bullish territory after spending much of February languishing around 22/100.
- On the other hand, privacy coins XMR and ZEC fell, losing around 1% each as traders alternated between altcoin sectors to position themselves ahead of a possible breakout.
