Crypto market enters final part of month in perilous position with Bitcoin still below $60,000 and ether (ETH) below $1,600.
The price of bitcoin has now lost more than 50% of its value since October’s record high, with analysts suggesting further declines are expected over the coming months.
The largest cryptocurrency is slightly in the black on Monday, rising 0.6% since midnight UTC to $59,800 despite the broader market structure and downward-biased chart formation.
Solana (SOL) recovered after falling to its lowest level since late 2023 earlier this month. It has advanced more than 13% since Thursday and 2% since midnight.
US stocks rose overnight as Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1% while S&P 500 futures rose 0.75%. Both indices remain in a downward trend since reaching record highs on June 15.
Positioning of derivative products
- More than $200 million in futures positions were closed or forcibly liquidated by exchanges in the past 24 hours, with long positions accounting for the majority of the amount.
- There are signs of a turnaround in the past four hours: The nearly $20 million in liquidations included $13 million in short sales. This shows how BTC’s rebound to $60,000 caught some bears off guard.
- The BTC futures market offers little excitement. Open interest (OI) is back within the ranges seen earlier this month, erasing the minor rise to 775,000 BTC seen on Friday. Traders seem less willing to take risks.
- The same goes for ether, where OI remains stuck at around 14.2 million ETH.
- Open interest positioning in SOL appears relatively high at 72.70 million SOL, just short of the record of over 76 million SOL set on June 24. This suggests potential for increased volatility in Solana’s native token.
- AVAX rose more than 5% last week, decoupling from weakness in market leader BTC. But that wasn’t enough to attract traders to leveraged bets. OI continues to decline, settling at 38.07 million tokens, the lowest since April 1. This raises questions about the sustainability of price gains.
- OI-adjusted 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) remains bearish. Most of the top 25 tokens, with the exception of TRX, XMR, and ZEC, are showing negative values, a sign that bears are driving price action by selling via market orders rather than limit orders.
- Volatility indices offer some good news, however. BVIV, which tracks BTC’s 30-day implied volatility, fell 5% to 47% today, halting its two-week rally. This suggests a renewed bet on market calm, usually characteristic of a sharp rise in spot prices.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH options continue to show a bias towards selling or downside protection. In the case of BTC, the $60,000 put option now has a theoretical open interest of almost $1 billion, nearly rivaling the $1.11 billion of the $80,000 call. These two option levels have been the main ones for at least two months. If prices drop below $60,000, the next big group of options will be at $50,000, with a notional OI of $712 million.
- Over the weekend, traders sold strangles at the July 10 expiration on HYPE options on decentralized platform Derive, according to data tracked by Laevitas. Shorting a strangle is a bet on price consolidation.
Symbolic discussion
- The altcoin market was little changed, trading in line with the largest cryptocurrencies, with traders appearing apathetic towards more speculative assets until Bitcoin confirmed its next move.
- Privacy coins Dash (DASH) and zcash (ZEC) are up more than 2% on Monday. The move comes after both assets lost between 18% and 30% over the past two weeks alone, suggesting this is more of a relief rally than a significant recovery.
- has lost 1.5% since midnight, joining the AI FET token in the red.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is at 49/100, a level it has held for most of June as investors focus on Bitcoin’s next move.
