Bitcoin edges upward but stays within a range as traders maintain a short-leaning stance
BTC climbs to $77,000 after defending the $75,000 support level, yet negative funding rates, stable open interest, and cautious positioning point to a lack of strong conviction.
Key points:
— Bitcoin has been confined between $75,000 and $80,000 since April 19, with negative funding rates suggesting traders are shorting any price rallies.
— Derivatives metrics show weak conviction: Open interest remains steady at $19 billion, and the basis is subdued at 1.5% annualized.
— Options markets lean bullish, with call-heavy flows and easing downside hedging demand despite broader macro uncertainty.
The crypto market ticked higher on Friday. Bitcoin
The increase comes after bitcoin found support at $75,000, a price it had earlier found difficult to climb above, on Wednesday. It has now been trapped between $75,000 and $80,000 since April 19. Negative funding rates on futures exchanges indicate that traders are generally positioned for a decline.
U.S. equity index futures were little changed. Nasdaq 100 futures cooled after the week’s Big Tech earnings, while S&P 500 futures are marginally in the black, up 5 points.
Precious metals fell, with gold and silver losing 1% and 0.7%, respectively, and the altcoin market is a mixed bag; AXS and HYPE rose by around 3%, but DeFi tokens MORPHO and AAVE are both in the red.
Derivatives positioning
— Open interest in bitcoin futures holds at $19 billion, roughly unchanged week-over-week, with speculative activity showing little conviction.
— Funding rates are broadly negative across multiple venues at around -2% annualized, except on Deribit, which saw a spike to 37%. The three-month annualized basis sits at 1.5%, also flat on the week, pointing to continued institutional caution.
— Options sentiment leans bullish: put/call volume over the past 24 hours is 58% in favor of calls, and the one-week delta skew has eased to 8.6% from 9.5%, indicating moderating demand for downside protection.
— The implied volatility term structure is in contango, with the front-end around 29% rising to ~45% at the March ’27 tenor, suggesting the market is pricing 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) led in terms of notional liquidations.
— The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $75,400 as a core liquidation level to monitor in the event of a price drop.
Token talk
— The Decryptnews Memecoin Index (CDMEME) was the best-performing benchmark, surging by 1.8%, followed by the Decryptnews Computing Select Index (CPUS), which added 1.4%.
— Decryptnews’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) lagged its peers, and was recently unchanged despite broader market optimism.
— Monad (MON) led the altcoin market on Friday, rallying by 6.7% over 24 hours. There were also notable gains for PENDLE, RAY and TAO, all up between 4.2% and 5.35%.
— The same can’t be said for
, the DeFi token linked to President Donald Trump’s family. That dropped by more than 2.6% since midnight following a governance vote on token lock-ups. It has now lost more than 77% since it was introduced in September. — Decryptnews’s Overnight Rate (CDOR), which tracks lending and borrowing rates on Aave, has returned to normal market conditions after the KelpDAO hack, a sign of strength in the DeFi sector.