Bitcoin rose 2.8% since midnight UTC after global markets fell when futures opened an hour earlier.
Futures on the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 indexes have both fallen more than 1.5% since midnight, as oil climbed as high as $115 a barrel, its highest level since June 2022. Precious metals also suffered. Gold and silver lost 1.6% and 1.1%, respectively, eroding the safe-haven narrative as investors flocked to the U.S. dollar.
Meanwhile, sentiment toward bitcoin is heating up and it has remained resilient in the face of the war in Iran and subsequent supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.
“While BTC has yet to fully earn its digital gold narrative, its practical use case as a digital escape hatch is becoming increasingly relevant, particularly in Gulf countries, amid bouts of currency volatility and political uncertainty,” trading firm QCP said in a note Monday.
Positioning of derivative products
- Exchanges liquidated crypto futures bets worth nearly $400 million in 24 hours. Bearish bets on oil took the biggest hit as prices of so-called black gold soared to $115 a barrel.
- Open interest (OI) on Bitcoin futures remains steady near weekly lows of around 650,000 BTC, a sign that the futures market is not participating in Monday morning’s rally. The OI in ether futures amounted to 13 million ether.
- XRP’s OI surged to 1.72 billion tokens, the highest since February 24, alongside an uptick in SOL OI, both indicating capital inflows.
- The OI in PAXG, AVAX, LTC and several other alternative tokens decreased over 24 hours. Investors appear to be reducing their risks in the face of the rebound in prices.
- The 30-day implied volatility indices for BTC and ETH remain stable, reflecting market calm amid chaos in Asian stock and oil markets.
- On Deribit, Bitcoin and Ether puts continue to trade at a premium to calls, signaling continued downside concerns. However, the premium remains largely unchanged from last week, suggesting that the surge in oil prices has not triggered outsized demand for protective puts.
- The term structure of BTC implied volatility remains in backwardation, a sign that traders are pricing in higher volatility in the short term compared to the long term. This corresponds to the unknowns of the war.
Symbolic discussion
- The altcoin market was buoyant overnight, with tokens such as DASH, XMR, and ZEC posting gains of between 3.8% and 5.2%.
- Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens also performed well. Both ETHFI and MORPHO outperformed bitcoin and ether (ETH) since midnight.
- CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator is now at 36/100, significantly higher than the February low of 22/100. A report from CoinDesk published on Friday suggested that the lack of altcoin mentions on social media could be bullish in terms of a market reversal.
- The best performing benchmark over the past 24 hours was CoinDesk’s Computing Select Index (CPUS), which includes Chainlink and bittensor (TAO) and is up 2.7%, followed by the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Select Index (SCPXC), which is up 0.92% since Sunday morning.
- On the other hand, the institutional-focused Token Canton (CC) lost 3.4% of its value over the past 24 hours, while the token created by Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, fell by around 2%.
