The crypto market showed signs of a cautious recovery on Thursday, with bitcoin trading at $77,900, up from Tuesday’s low of $76,100, and ether (ETH) at $2,130 after adding just 0.1% since midnight UTC.
The altcoin sector remains mixed. While Hyperliquid (HYPE) rose for a fifth straight day, adding 6.5% for a 53% gain over the past week, privacy coins gave back some of Wednesday’s gains.
U.S. stocks ended a three-day losing streak on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 index up 1.5% as investors anticipated a strong earnings report from Nvidia (NVDA), which beat forecasts with record quarterly revenue of $81.62 billion.
Oil prices fell as US President Donald Trump said a peace deal with Iran was in its “final stages”, providing a boost to risk assets.
Positioning of derivative products
- Crypto futures volume rose 15% to $165.7 billion, open interest rose nearly 1% to $128 billion and liquidations jumped 72% to $266 million, ending a two-day streak of declining activity.
- Hyperliquid’s HYPE token leads the top 100 coins with open interest reaching the highest level since February 19. Coupled with positive cumulative volume delta (CVD) and slightly positive funding, the increase suggests that aggressive buyers of market orders, not passive buyers of limit orders, are in the driver’s seat without yet showing signs of overheating.
- A similar uptrend was evident in privacy coin zcash (ZEC), which dominated the daily open interest leaderboard throughout the week.
- DASH futures are also heating up. Open interest surged 38% to 1.98 million tokens, but the “boom-bust” price rejection at $54, along with the negative CVD, suggests sellers are aggressively dampening rallies with market orders.
- Negative CVDs on other assets like XMR, SUI, TON, HBAR, M, BNB, and CC further indicate that sellers are aggressive with market orders rather than passively trading via limit orders.
- The Bitcoin futures market remains stagnant with open interest stuck in the 720,000-750,000 BTC range for the seventh day. The lack of momentum is reflected in the ether (ETH) market.
- Ether’s 30-day implied volatility fell to a low of 53% in 2026, surpassing the floor levels set in late 2024, while Bitcoin’s BVIV remained stable at almost 40%, suggesting a general calm in the face of macro risks.
- In the options market, a large block trade involved the sale of a short XRP straddle, representing a high-conviction bet on the token’s spot price remaining in a range around $1.40 through the end of June.
- For BTC and ETH, strangle has become the most favored options strategy on Deribit over the past 24 hours, suggesting traders are positioning themselves to break out of the current low volatility regime.
Symbolic discussion
- HYPE is rightly receiving plaudits this week, with a gain of over 20% in the last 24 hours, with daily trading volume jumping 135% to $1.3 billion.
- The CoinDesk Memecoin Select Index (CDMEME) fell 0.2% on Thursday and 0.9% over 24 hours. All other CoinDesk benchmarks are higher over a 24-hour period, while the CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS) has outperformed its peers.
- A pseudonymous crypto analyst “skew” described the altcoin market as being in a “decisive” position this week, referring to the total crypto market capitalization excluding bitcoin, which has seen a series of higher highs and lower lows since February.
- Speculation is once again heating up on several altcoin trading pairs, including double zero (2Z), which saw trading volume increase by over 410%, leading to a 17% increase in the token over the past 24 hours.
