The bitcoin price is little changed over the past 24 hours despite a wave of sell pressure across multiple crypto exchanges. Lookonchain revealed that one long-term holder shifted a $228 million stack of bitcoin to Kraken, while bitcoin miner MARA Holdings (MARA) transferred $58 million worth of BTC to Falcon X and Coinbase Prime.
The market absorbed this increased level of supply as trading volume for BTC increased by 5% to $81 billion.
The altcoin market underperformed bitcoin. Ether tumbled by 3.4% alongside several other tokens, some of which, including canton (CC), fell by more than 10%.
Derivatives positioning
- Over $600 million worth of leveraged crypto futures positions have been liquidated in the past 24 hours, with the majority being long bets. This suggests that bullish leverage continues to unwind.
- Yet the open interest (OI) in ZEC, BTC, SOL and DOGE futures has increased, while XRP, ETH, ASTER, AVAX have seen capital outflows.
- Annualized funding rates in TRX and ZEC perpetuals remain negative, indicating a bias for shorts. The rest of the major cryptocurrencies are seeing mildly positive rates.
- On the CME, OI in bitcoin futures has dropped to 133.25K, the lowest since late September. Overall positioning remains light, with the tally well below the December 2024 high of over 200K BTC.
- ETH’s CME OI slide has stalled near 2 million ETH, down from the record high of 2.63 million in late October.
- On Deribit, call spreads and strangles have dominated block flows. One large trade featured the Nov. 28 expiry $90,000 put option. In ETH’s case, put spreads accounted for 43% of the 24-hour block flow.
Token talk
By Oliver Knight
- The altcoin market gave back much of Wednesday’s gains over the past 24 hours as ether slipped by 3.4%, dragging several other tokens down with it.
- CoinMarketCap’s “altcoin season” indicator fell by five points to 26/100 as bitcoin remained flat. The CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index posted a 0.66% drop.
- There were a few outliers to the bearish market trend, in particular rose by more than 10% in the period as it staged a technical breakout, while zcash extended its two-month long ascent with a gain of 8.7%.
- Base founder Jesse Pollak said he planned to issue a token on Thursday under the ticker JESSE. The move attracted skepticism because Pollak had previously shared a number of of “content tokens,” all of which rapidly lost value after being unveiled.
- “Content coins track short term attention, creator coins track long term content,” Pollak wrote on X in response to concerns. “Value paired together they create a flywheel that puts ownership, control, and upside back in the hands of creators and their followers. With $jesse, my flywheel will be complete.”
- Memecoins and viral tokens, of which JESSE could be considered an example, have underperformed the wider market in recent months. The CoinDesk Memecoin index (CDMEME) has dropped by more than 40% since September, while the CoinDesk20 is down by around 30% in the same period.
