Cryptocurrency markets experienced rare volatility during Monday’s Asian session, with Bitcoin Bitcoin prices fell more than 5% to $64,270 shortly after midnight UTC before rebounding to $66,300 at 11:00 UTC.
The sell-off and subsequent rebound mirrored trends in U.S. stocks. Futures tracking the S&P 500 opened down 0.84% on Sunday night before recovering five hours later.
Gold futures, by contrast, opened higher on Sunday night to their highest levels since January 30 before giving up some of those gains during the European session. Silver follows more expensive metals.
Precious metals surged and risk assets weakened after U.S. President Donald Trump said he planned to impose new 15% global tariffs on trading partners and an increased U.S. military presence near Iran sparked a rush for safe-haven assets.
Altcoins succumbed to low liquidity conditions overnight as solana (SOL) and Bitcoin prices fell between 7% and 8% before rebounding during the European trading session, a move that led to $270 million in altcoin liquidations, according to CoinGlass data.
Derivatives Positioning
- Demand for leveraged products remains tepid, as evidenced by total cryptocurrency futures open interest remaining below $100 billion for more than two weeks in a row.
- Liquidation doesn’t help either. In the past 24 hours, $500 million worth of cryptocurrency futures bets were forced to close by exchanges due to margin shortages.
- Traders continue to allocate funds into futures tied to traditional asset-related tokens such as gold. For example, open interest in Tether gold (XAUT) futures increased by 14% in 24 hours, although funds from BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, DOGE and others continued to outflow.
- ZEC and CRO are the only coins with positive 24-hour cumulative delta volume (CVD), a sign of buyer dominance. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and other major currencies have negative CVDs, a sign that selling pressure is overwhelming buyers.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, has risen 9% to over 60%, indicating renewed nervousness in the market.
- Traders are chasing Bitcoin put options towards the $58,000, $60,000 and $62,000 levels as Trump’s new tariffs bring new uncertainty to the market.
- On Deribit, Bitcoin and Ethereum puts are trading higher than calls on all time frames, indicating lingering downside concerns.
token talk
- The altcoin market remained in the red on Monday after weakness in Bitcoin and U.S. stocks triggered excessive selling.
- Low liquidity conditions caused Pump.fun’s native PUMP token to lose 8.5% of its value before rebounding, while Layer Zero (ZRO) began selling off early on Sunday, losing 16.5% in 24 hours before recovering at 04:00 UTC.
- A handful of coins are outperforming the broader market. Re-staking token ETHFI is up more than 10% from Monday morning’s lows.
- Telegram-related toncoin (TON) was more stable overnight, falling just 3.6% before rebounding 4.9%.
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) was the best-performing benchmark over the past 24 hours, down only 1.84%, while the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Select Index and CoinDesk Compute Select Index fell 3.56% and 3.23% respectively.
- The altcoin market has largely been tracking Bitcoin in February, although a lack of liquidity has led to exaggerated moves. For example, if Bitcoin is able to hit local lows and rebound above $70,000, some altcoins are primed for further gains after order books were cleared in early February.
