Cryptocurrencies struggled to mirror bullish moves in stocks and precious metals on Wednesday, with BTC posting a modest gain as it traded at $112,000, the bottom of its range.
Altcoins performed even worse, with FET falling 6.2% after Ocean Protocol decided to leave the ASI Alliance and reportedly offloaded its tokens to Binance. There was also a 10% drop for MYX and a 4% drop for CAKE, as the “altcoin season” index on CoinMarketCap fell to 38/100, despite being at 67/100 earlier this month.
Positioning of derivative products
- XPL, ASTER, SUI, and LINK saw a notable increase in futures open interest, while the top 10 tokens showed mixed performance overall.
- A whale address, labeled 0xc2a3, opened a 5x short in BTC worth $140 million on Hyperliquide.
- BTC futures open interest on Binance jumped $510 million during Asian hours as a trader moved $89 million in USDC to the exchange, possibly to short futures contracts.
- Perpetual funding rates of the majors, including bitcoin and ether, remained stable to negative, implying a sense of caution.
- BTC futures activity on the CME remains subdued while options open interest reached an all-time high of 61.44K BTC. Ether futures and options positioning remained elevated near lifetime highs.
- On Deribit, the short and short BTC options bias increased slightly during overnight trading. Feeds on the OTC Paradigm desk included a long position in the $108,000 BTC put expiring on October 18.
Symbolic discussion
By Olivier Knight
- formerly fetch.ai, endured a grueling week; losing 43% of its value in a massive sell-off caused by Ocean Protocol’s decision to leave the Alliance.
- “As many of you have seen, Ocean Protocol has chosen to move away from the ASI Alliance,” the company wrote on
- The token suffered a flash crash on October 10, along with the broader crypto market, but since then price action has shown persistent selling behavior, with little to no respite for buyers.
- FET is now trading at $0.31, its lowest point in two years having eroded any bullish gains from the recent bull market.
- At one point in 2024, it was above $3.11 amid a wave of AI-related bullish sentiment, but it hasn’t had a spark since.
- The move reflects the bubbling nature of AI, with the IMF warning on Wednesday that if the AI bubble bursts, it could rival the infamous dot-com crash.
