Bitcoin slipped to around $81,400 on Tuesday, down 0.5% since midnight UTC, even after U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds attracted $526.6 million on Monday, their largest daily inflow in nearly a month.
Asian stocks set the tone, with South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index falling 3.73% to its lowest close since April 7 as SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics declined with renewed worries over AI spending weighing on chipmakers’ shares. Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.31%.
Altcoin losses were broadly in line with bitcoin. Ether fell 0.9% to near $2,385 and the CoinDesk 80 (CD80) lost 0.34%, compared with a 0.33% drop for the bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 5 (CD5). DeFi gave back Monday’s lead, with the sector index (DFX) dropping 1.2%, the weakest of the CoinDesk benchmarks.
Brent crude is near $110 a barrel as Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia keep supply risks in view. Roughly 70 S&P 500 companies report earnings this week, with General Motors before the bell and United Airlines after the close.
Derivatives positioning
- Bitcoin open interest on Coinalyze fell to $27.4 billion, down 0.6% over 24 hours, while the aggregated funding rate was roughly 8.8% annualized. Ether’s funding of about 3.9% annualized suggests a bullish bias among traders.
- Longs hold around 55% of bitcoin positions, Coinalyze data shows, with a long/short ratio of 1.24. Binance’s top traders show a similar tilt, with a BTC-USDT position ratio of 1.78 on CoinGlass.
- Puts outtraded calls by more than two to one on Deribit over 24 hours, with the Oct. 30 $80,000 put the busiest contract. Out-of-the-money puts also cost more than equivalent calls, by 2.5 to 4 volatility points across expiries, a bearish skew that shows traders paying for downside protection even as open interest leans toward calls at $90,000-$100,000 for Oct. 30.
- CoinGlass shows $155.1 million of liquidations over 24 hours, down 54.7% from the previous day, with longs about 69% of the total on CoinMarketCap’s tally. Bitcoin and ether each saw around $30 million on Coinalyze, together about half of the $120.6 million it tracked.
Token talk
- Celestia (TIA) rose 2.2% to around 63 cents, the biggest gainer on the CoinDesk 100 Index (CD100), adding to a gain of about 42% over the month. The run has coincided with Celestia’s Oct. 1 benchmark showing its Fibre scaling system averaging 3.07 terabits per second. At the same time, options exchange Derive chose Celestia for data availability in its V3 release. The next test is an unlock of 5.58 million TIA on Oct. 31, according to Tokenomist.
- Sandbox led the CD100 lower with a 4.5% drop to about 6 cents, giving back part of a gain of about 30% over the month. That rally began after South Korean crypto exchanges Upbit, Bithumb and Coinone lifted trading cautions imposed in August following a bridge exploit.
- Layer-2 tokens were among the weakest, with arbitrum falling 3.6% and starknet dropping 3.2%. Starknet remains up about 29% over the month after surging on Oct. 9 and 10, when the network said it was considering becoming a standalone quantum-resistant layer-1 by 2027.
- DeFi tokens handed back more of Monday’s rally, with uniswap (UNI) losing 2.3% to about $7.14 and morpho down 2.5%. UNI has slumped about 20% over the month even though its fee switch lifted protocol revenue to $14.81 million in September, its strongest month since it began retaining fees, according to Token Terminal.
- Ethena (ENA) fell 1.9%, extending a decline of about 30% over the month from a late-September peak near 29 cents. USDe supply of about $4.7 billion, down from a peak near $15 billion, is still well short of the $7.5 billion level at which ENA buybacks would switch on.
