Bitcoin was little changed since midnight UTC, trading around $82,100 after bouncing from a dip to about $81,600 at around 03:30 UTC. It’s comfortably above Thursday’s brief break below $80,000, its first in a month.
Altcoins edged ahead, with ether adding 0.5% near $2,450 and the CoinDesk 80 (CD80) gaining 0.46%, while the bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 5 (CD5) held steady. Celestia (TIA) jumped 16%, injective rose 7.7% and layerzero added 7.3%, leaving four in every five CoinDesk 100 Index (CD100) members higher and lifting CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season index to 60 from 50 a day earlier.
Asian equities steadied after Thursday’s rout, with South Korea’s Kospi closing 2.05% higher and Japan’s Nikkei up 1.39%, while S&P 500 futures were little changed after the index snapped a three-day losing streak.
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh declined to signal the central bank’s intentions for its meeting later this month in a speech at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, with the odds of an October interest-rate increase dropping to about 15% from roughly 30%, according to the CME Fedwatch tool. Treasury yields were largely stable.
Derivatives positioning
- Trading volume cools, leverage resets: Crypto futures volume slid 20% over 24 hours to $200 billion, while open interest rose 2% to $142.21 billion. Liquidations dropped to $311 million from nearly $1 billion yesterday. Quieter trading with positions still building suggests the forced selling has run its course.
- Sellers ease off: The 24-hour long/short taker volume ratio is balanced, compared with shorts making up 52% yesterday. Aggressive selling has faded.
- BTC, ETH and SOL gains lack fresh long bets: Bitcoin’s notional open interest rose just 0.3% against a 1% price gain, which means the number of contracts outstanding slipped slightly. Ether and solana show the same pattern, with open interest up by less than their spot prices. The moves look driven by traders closing shorts, not by new long positions.
- XRP traders are cashing out into the rally: XRP’s open interest fell 1% while its spot price gained 1.4%, so contracts were closed on a rise. Its 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta, which tracks net aggressive buying and selling at market prices rather than passive limit orders, is also negative. The bounce has little support from derivatives traders.
- ZEC leads with new bullish bets: ZEC futures open interest jumped 14% against an 11.5% price gain, so traders added contracts to the rise. Its OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta is the most positive among majors, a sign that buyers are the aggressors. TRX, XAUT and ETH also show positive readings while BTC is neutral and UNI, HBAR and XRP are negative.
- Funding signals a bullish tilt but no froth: Annualized perpetual funding rates for major tokens hover between 5% and 10%. That shows a bias toward longs but nothing out of the ordinary, so the market is far from overheated and has room for further gains.
- Implied volatility keeps falling: BVIV, the 30-day implied volatility index for bitcoin, slammed to 38% from yesterday’s high of 42%, and ether’s implied volatility also fell. Options traders are pricing a calmer market, which matches the funding picture.
- Options traders hedge while eyeing ether upside: Decentralized exchange Derive pointed to a large bitcoin put spread that crossed the tape early this week, betting on a drop to $78,000. The $80,000 put is the most traded option on Deribit, the centralized options giant, so some traders are still buying downside protection. In ether, the $2,600 call is the most traded of the past 24 hours.
Token talk
- Celestia (TIA), the modular data-availability network token, rose 16% to around $0.68, the biggest gain in the CD100 and a 2026 high. The token has advanced about 59% over four weeks, with the rally coinciding with Celestia Fibre hitting 3.07 terabits per second in a throughput benchmark and the introduction of a proposed economic upgrade called the Sustainable Blob Economy.
- Injective , the finance-focused layer-1 token, climbed 7.7% to about $9.19. While there’s no obvious, overriding narrative, there are three pending U.S. exchange-traded fund applications tied to the token. CoinMarketCap shows $289.7 million of INJ volume over 24 hours, up 128% from the prior day.
- LayerZero , the cross-chain messaging token, gained 7.3% to about $2.24, extending a rally linked to its ATLAS trading infrastructure, which routes most of its fees into buying and burning the token. Ether.fi (ETHFI), the liquid restaking token, rose 4.2%.
- Starknet was the weakest CD100 member, down 9.6% to $0.08 after an 11% gain on Thursday, and stacks , a bitcoin-staking layer token, fell 4.2%.
- Larger names were mixed to higher, with solana (SOL) up 1.2% to about $107, XRP up 0.5% and monero (XMR) up 2.9% to about $565, while BNB barely moved.
