Bitcoin is taking a break after hitting a new all-time high at $67,000 earlier last week.
Towards the end of the last week, we briefly went under $60k, and today it is trading just under $63k.
Right before the weekend, Bitcoin had entered into “overbought” territory, with its 14-day relative strength index (RSI) coming in at 71 at one point. If the RSI of an asset crosses above 70, it is considered overbought and oversold below 30.
“Bullish sentiment among futures traders on Bitcoin reached 92% this week,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak + Co, referring to the Daily Sentiment Index. “That’s very high, so it needs to take a breather to work off these short-term conditions.”
The funding rate, meanwhile, is currently between 0.01% and 0.0408%. The highest is currently on OKEx, with Bybit not far behind at 0.0349%. BTC’s annualized daily basis on Binance is around 12.28%, down from 15.32% from last week but nowhere near 41.4% in mid-April. CME basis also hit February levels last week.
As the price has stabilized some after the new ATH, the premium on CME has also come down a bit. Compared to $62,800 on Coinbase, as of writing, on CME, Bitcoin is trading at $62,850.
The open interest on Bitcoin futures on the regulated exchange CME continues to hit new highs, so much so that it has moved into first place.
OI on CME for Bitcoin futures contracts has hit $5.70 billion, higher than Binance’s $5.60 billion, according to Skew. In third place is FTX with $4.04 billion in OI, followed by Bybit at $3.23 bln, then OKEx at $2.25 bln, then Huobi at $1.46 bln, and Deribit with $1.39 bln.
According to Arcane Research, this growth in OI is driven by the Bitcoin futures ETF that has CME’s OI now accounting for 22.3% of the market versus Binance’s 22%.
Based on volume, however, Binance is a clear winner at $24.15 bln, with CME at 6th place with nearly $1 billion in the past 24 hours.
This growth in futures and perps volume highlights the growing importance of derivatives for price discovery.
Leveraged funds are opening new shorts of CME #bitcoin futures taking advantage of the widening basis pic.twitter.com/dVOpO8zP7a
— Coinbase Institutional (@CoinbaseInsto) October 25, 2021
Open interest in options also hit at an ATH last week at $15.72 bln. Currently, it is at $13.9 bln to start the new week. Nearly 90% of this OI belongs to Deribit, followed by LedgerX and CME, having over 3% market share each.
Besides Bitcoin, last week, Ether also came close to hitting a new high on Coinbase and then dropped under $4k on the weekend. As of writing, we are back to trading around $4,150 with total OI in Ether futures at $12.09 billion. On CME, OI has been staying above $1 bln after first hitting it in the first half of last week.
The market participants are increasingly becoming more confident that we are in the second inning of this bull cycle. They are expecting to see Bitcoin rally to be worth six digits and Ether five digits.
Alex Hoptner, CEO of crypto derivatives platform BitMEX, is one of them who sees $100k for bitcoin at the end of the year driven by wide interests of mass retail, more and more institutional players coming in, and the asset class being totally outside of the classical financial system. Hoptner, in an interview with Bloomberg, explained,
“We see a huge mass market adoption of traditional finance players come into the market as well as retail driving the market. Natural developments like the precious Bitcoin ETF helps that and the mass market adoption. But we see this also from the rising inflation that there’s more and more interest in that because this nascent outside of the classical financial system and actually pretty interesting interest rates to be gained on that one an annualized basis over 10% sometimes. So I think that all adds up to being a pretty much good rally and it’s not the end yet.”
AnTy
