Bitcoin It was trading at $69,500 in European morning trading, giving up gains on Tuesday after a rejection at $71,750.
The largest cryptocurrency is down 0.55% since midnight UTC, losses dwarfed by several altcoins such as zcash (ZEC) and aave Decreased 4.5% and 2.1% respectively.
Gold and the dollar were little changed, while U.S. stock futures rose 0.15%.
Price action remains influenced by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, which continues despite conflicting comments from U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
As a result, oil prices continued to fluctuate, falling to US$81 per barrel on Tuesday before rebounding to US$89 per barrel during the European session on Wednesday.
Derivatives Positioning
- Bitcoin’s failure to build momentum above $70,000 has proven costly for bulls holding leveraged long bets. Over $220 million worth of cryptocurrency futures bets have been liquidated in the past 24 hours, with bulls accounting for the majority.
- Open interest (OI) in U.S. dollar-denominated Bitcoin futures on major exchanges has dropped from 233,000 BTC to 226,000 BTC. This suggests that overnight price declines are not really causing traders to short the falling market. The same dynamic is present with solana (SOL) and ethereum (ETH) futures.
- XRP futures activity continues to grow, with open interest rising to 1.74 billion, the highest level since February 23.
- Overall, OI for most alternative tokens has declined over the past 24 hours, a sign of capital outflows again.
- TRX, CC, and XMR stand out with a bullish combination of positive annualized funding rates and cumulative volume delta (CVD), indicating active buying in the futures market. Financing rates and CVD for most other tokens are flat or even negative.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day Implied Volatility Index, BVIV, fell for the third day in a row, but its major averages (50-day, 100-day, and 200-day indicators) are now stacked on top of each other. This is a bullish sign and means volatility is likely to increase.
- The same goes for the Ethereum Volatility Index. In addition, Wall Street’s VIX index rose 4% to 26%, indicating increased volatility in stocks that may spread to cryptocurrencies.
- On CME, open interest in BTC futures has fallen to $7.39 billion, the lowest level since September 2024, while ETH futures have also fallen sharply. Clearly, institutional interest in both tokens remains weak.
- On Deribit, BTC and ETH protective puts continue to trade at a premium to calls, although demand for downside protection has waned significantly since early last month. On decentralized exchange Derive, traders are increasingly betting that the price will rise above $80,000, while selling on Deribit, Derive told CoinDesk.
token talk
- AI token Internet Computer (ICP) led gains in the altcoin sector on Wednesday, rising more than 8% after listing on South Korean exchange Upbit. After the listing, daily trading volume jumped from US$65 million to US$267 million as retail investors poured in.
- Continuing with the AI theme, rose, up 6% in the past 24 hours.
- The positive performance in AI can be partly attributed to a rare blog post by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in which he claimed that AI is an industrial construct comparable to electrification.
- The rest of the altcoin market retreated on Wednesday, with decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens Curve (CRV) and Jupiter (JUP) each falling 6.5% in the past 24 hours.
- Cryptocurrency sentiment is slowly improving with the Fear and Greed Index at 25/100, entering the “fear” zone after being stuck in the “extreme fear” zone for more than a month.
- The rise is a result of the relative strength in cryptocurrency markets since the outbreak of the Iran war, with both Bitcoin and the broader market Outperforms precious metals and U.S. stocks Effective from March 1st.