Bitcoin was trading at $76,600 on Tuesday, down 0.8% since midnight UTC, as Monday’s brief rebound to $77,800 fades. The move leaves the largest cryptocurrency potentially forming another lower high in a bearish structure in place since October and down 7% over the past two weeks.
This weakness is not reflected in the broader financial markets. S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq 100 futures gained more than 0.5%, indicating crypto-specific headwinds rather than macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures.
Ether (ETH) is in a worse situation. Trading at $2,098, ETH has lost more than 10% in the past two weeks and is firmly in the middle of the range it carved out between February and April, with no signs of recovering lost ground.
The altcoin market is mixed, with notable gains for AI tokens and sharp losses for tokens that performed well earlier in the year, like zcash (ZEC), which has lost around 7% since midnight.
Positioning of derivative products
- Crypto futures market volume fell 10% to $130 billion in 24 hours. Notional open interest (OI) was little changed around $126 billion, and 24-hour liquidations decreased 21% to $126 million. This indicates a stable and rather boring market environment after the long weekend in the United States (although crypto is never closed).
- SHIB, LINK, HBAR, NEAR and TRX are the main gainers in OI of the last 24 hours, while ZEC, XLM and HYPE are the losers. The action indicates selective market positioning rather than large-scale capital deployment into the altcoin space.
- NEAR rose 58% in the week ended May 24 and has since gained another 14% to $2.82, a level last seen in November. The rally, likely fueled by a series of improvements involving dynamic scaling, privacy and quantum defenses, is accompanied by an influx of new capital into derivatives. Open interest soared to a record 309 million tokens, up from 182 million a week ago.
- NEAR also has the most positive 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) among major tokens, a sign that buyers are determining price action by trading on market orders rather than passive limit orders. Funding rates are only slightly positive, a sign that the market is far from overheated. Together, these elements signal the potential for continued price increases.
- The OI for Chainlink’s LINK futures increased to 42.96 million tokens, the highest since February 7. Annualized funding rates of around 8% indicate that futures contracts are trading above the spot price, a bullish sign for data provider Oracle.
- Bitcoin futures have cooled off. The OI in BTC returned to 711,000 BTC from 793,000 BTC at the start of the month. ETH OI sits just below all-time highs near 15 million ETH. The 30-day implied volatility indexes for BTC and ETH continue to fall, a sign of continued volatility selling and no sign of panic demand for options.
- Yet on Deribit, BTC strike prices ranging from $70,000 to $76,000 are among the most traded in the last 24 hours. Puts represent a bearish bet, providing protection against price weakness in the underlying asset.
Symbolic discussion
- CoinDesk’s Computing Select Index (CPUS) was the best-performing benchmark on Tuesday, up 1.9% since midnight UTC and 2.7% over the past 24 hours.
- CPUS is a basket of AI tokens and chainlinks. FET added 4.8% on Tuesday and RENDER climbed 7.2%.
- The DeFi Select Index (DFX) also outperformed the crypto majors, up 1.3%. This gain suggests that investors are opting for more speculative bets as they wait for bitcoin and ether to resolve their current trading ranges.
- Privacy tokens weakened across the board as Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH) followed zcash (ZEC) down around 1.5% each.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is currently at 35/100, up from last week’s low of 31/100 and below the monthly high of 50/100.
