Bitcoin steadied near $80,400 after dipping to around $79,300 during the Asian morning, leaving it little changed since midnight UTC. Altcoins were mixed, with ether dropping 0.2% and the DeFi index (DFX) the only CoinDesk index to gain. The tone was set at the weekend, when Arthur Hayes said his Maelstrom fund sold its entire directional book, including 6,400 ether due to macro and geopolitical risk.
S&P 500 index futures rose around 0.3% after Friday’s selloff in U.S. stocks, while oil retreated, with U.S. crude falling around 2% to near $101 a barrel and Brent slipping to around $110 as Qatari mediators arrived in Tehran on Sunday and President Donald Trump said there would be no strike that day, though he kept the option open.
The Fed, which raised interest rates in September, decides again on Wednesday. The CME’s FedWatch tool shows a 90% chance of no change and around an 80% chance of another increase in December. Spot bitcoin ETF flows are also in focus after $138 million of outflows on Friday, taking the two-day exit to $772 million, according to data from Farside Investors.
Derivatives positioning
- Crypto futures take a breather: Open interest (OI) rose 0.85% to $139.9 billion in 24 hours while volume fell 1.78%. Liquidations dropped 71% to $153 million. The long/short taker volume ratio split of 50.34% to 49.66% shows no tilt.
- Bitcoin barely moved and positioning barely changed: The BTC price rose 0.20% and open interest rose 0.84%, so only a small amount of money came in. Volume fell 7.21%. Ether looked the same, with open interest up 0.45% and the price adding 0.23%.
- Funding is mildly positive across the board, with no crowded corner: The 24-hour heatmap for major cryptocurrencies is a uniform green. USDE and TRX sit at the low end. Nobody is paying a heavy premium to hold longs, meaning demand for leverage is nothing out of ordinary.
- ZEC added money as the price rose: Open interest grew 8.17% and the price advanced 3.84%, so about 4% of new money came in. Volume rose 19.11%. Funding of 0.0063% is modest, so the new positions are not expensive to hold.
- ENA’s rally drew money: Open interest rose 16.85% over 24 hours against an 8.36% price gain, with volume up 81.51%. The past hour showed a 2.04% fall in open interest. Some of the money that came in during the rally has started to leave.
- Crude is the only top-20 market with negative funding: The funding rate in crude perps is -0.0077%. The price fell 1.55% and open interest dropped 7.37%, so money left as the price declined. Volume jumped 190.88%. The positions that remain lean short.
- Market-order flow paints a mixed picture: The OI-normalized cumulative volume delta (CVD) for XMR, ZEC, GRAM, CC and SOL is positive, a sign that market-order buying is outweighing market-order selling in these markets. Tokens such as DOGE, LINK, HYPE, XLM have negative CVDs.
- BTC put skew intact: The busiest contract was the Oct. 28 $77,000 put, ahead of the Oct. 28 $84,000 call. The one-month skew fell to about 12.5% from about 14.5%, so puts still cost more than calls, albeit by less than a day ago.
- ETH puts dominate volume: Four of the top six contracts were puts, led by the Oct. 29 $2,000 strike. The one-week skew dropped to about 8.7% from about 13.3%, so here, too, puts still cost more than calls.
Token talk
- Uniswap (UNI) rose 1.9% and ethena (ENA) around 1%, shrugging off Saturday’s sale of 323,000 UNI and 14 million ENA by Arthur Hayes’ Maelstrom fund.
- AI-linked tokens lagged more broadly, with grass , a data network for AI training, dropping 2.7% and near losing 1.4%. The moves coincided with Elon Musk’s Sunday warning that lenders have shut off credit to the 200 or so AI-only cloud providers.
- Hyperliquid (HYPE) rose around 1%, with traders still digesting Friday’s decision by Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), the Nasdaq-listed company that holds the token, to more than triple its share buyback to $100 million, a program that applies to PURR stock only.
- CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season index stands at 53/100, down from 58 on Friday.
