The crypto market rose on Friday. Bitcoin It was trading up 1.25% at $77,250 as of midnight UTC, and the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) was up 0.7% with 14 members.
The rise comes after bitcoin found support at $75,000, a price that had struggled to climb above earlier on Wednesday. It is now stuck between $75,000 and $80,000 since April 19. Negative funding rates on futures exchanges indicate that traders are generally positioned to go short.
US equity index futures were little changed. Nasdaq 100 futures cooled after the week’s big tech earnings, while S&P 500 futures were marginally in the dark, up 5 points.
Precious metals fell, with gold and silver down 1% and 0.7% respectively, and the altcoin market is a mixed bag. AXS and HYPE rose around 3%, but DeFi tokens MORPHO and AAVE are both in the red.
Derivative positioning
- Open interest in bitcoin futures is at $19 billion, almost unchanged from week-to-week, with speculative activity showing little certainty.
- Funding rates are broadly negative at around -2% p.a. in several locations, except for Derebat, which saw an increase of up to 37%. The three-month annualized basis sits at 1.5%, which is also flat on the week, pointing to continued institutional caution.
- Options sentiment tilts sharply: put/call volume over the past 24 hours is 58% in favor of calls, and the one-week delta skew has decreased from 9.5% to 8.6%, indicating moderate demand for downside protection.
- The implied volatility term structure is in contango, with the front-end up around 29% to ~45% in the March ’27 period, suggesting the market is pricing in longer-dated uncertainty rather than immediate tail risk.
- CoinGlass data shows $149 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 30-70 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($50 million) and ETH ($29 million) advanced in terms of notional liquidation.
- The Binance Liquidation Heatmap identifies $75,400 as a key liquidation level to monitor in the event of a price drop.
Token Talk
- The CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) was the best-performing benchmark, up 1.8%, followed by the CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS), which gained 1.4%.
- CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) has lagged its peers, and has been largely unchanged recently despite broader market optimism.
- Monad (MON) led the altcoin market on Friday, gaining 6.7% over 24 hours. There were also notable gains for PENDLE, RAY and TAO, all between 4.2% and 5.35%.
- The same cannot be said for a DeFi token linked to President Donald Trump’s family. It has fallen more than 2.6 percent since midnight after the governance vote on token lock-ups. It is now down more than 77 percent since it was introduced in September.
- Coin Desk Overnight Rate (CDOR)which tracks lending and borrowing rates on Aave, has returned to normal market conditions following the KelpDAO hack, a sign of strength in the DeFi sector.
