Bitcoin is trading near $66,500 after adding 1.1% since midnight UTC and more than 5% from the weekend low of $63,000.
The crypto market is back in the middle of a trading range that has persisted since early February, with a volatile last week testing $70,000 on the upside and $62,500 on the downside.
The weekend’s price action was driven by military strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, triggering retaliatory attacks and raising concerns about possible disruptions to traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
According to trading firm QCP, the strike triggered long liquidations of around $300 million – but the scale of forced selling was relatively contained, suggesting markets were already positioned for a volatile weekend.
This escalation pushed investors towards traditional safe havens, propelling gold and silver to their highest levels in more than a month. Oil jumped 13% to $82 a barrel, its highest price since July 2024.
U.S. stock index futures fell, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures down 1.1% and 1.5%, respectively, since midnight UTC.
The crypto market showed resilience, with most of the losses occurring on Saturday when US markets were closed.
Positioning of derivative products
- The consequences of the war in Iran were more contained than expected. Although cumulative open interest for cryptocurrency futures fell 2% to $93.78 billion, it remains above the recent low of $92.40 billion.
- More than $300 million in leveraged bets were liquidated by centralized exchanges in 24 hours, with bullish bets accounting for the majority of the total.
- The annualized perpetual funding rates of major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and ether were little changed and turned negative, indicating a slightly bearish bias.
- Still, the market is not showing signs of panic, as evidenced by bitcoin’s 30-day annualized implied volatility index, BVIV. It remains stable around 58.8%, well within the price range observed last week. The same goes for the Ether Volatility Index.
- On Deribit, short-term bitcoin call options trade at an 8-10% volatility premium over calls, a sign of increased downside concerns. The $60,000 put, or bearish bet, remains the most popular on the stock market.
- Block flows presented demand for bitcoin sales spreads.
Symbolic discussion
- The altcoin market largely tracked bitcoin over the weekend, but one of the fastest to recover was lending token MORPHO, which continued its impressive two-week streak with a 5% jump in the last 24 hours, after rising 2.6% since midnight UTC.
- Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens JUP, AAVE, and LDO are all in the black as speculative appetite remains relatively strong despite a global shift toward safe-haven investments.
- Hyperliquid’s HYPE token surged more than 29% on Saturday to break February’s downtrend. Although it lost 3.8% on Monday, it remains above the crucial $30 support level.
- the DeFi token linked to the family of US President Donald Trump, extended its decline, falling 2.5% of its value since midnight. It is now down more than 44% since mid-January, following a series of lower highs and lower lows.
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) is the only positive benchmark over the past 24 hours. The worst performers were the CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) and the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Select Capped Index (SCPXC), down 1.87% and 1.71%, respectively.
