Key points
- Bitcoin jumped to $83,339 on Kraken in the 14:00 UTC hour, above Monday’s $83,100 high, then slipped back to end the US session near $82,400.
- The level that capped the day was $83,339; the level that held was the Asia low near $81,100.
- $84,250 is still the Brief’s Bearish flip line; a sustained break below $81,100 would bring Sunday’s $80,568 low and Friday’s $78,000 put strike back into view.
Stocks rotated. Bitcoin spiked.
Bitcoin traded near $82,424 on Kraken at about 20:01 UTC, up 0.7% from its UTC open of $81,843 and about 1.1% under the session high. Coinbase showed $82,419 with a 24-hour range of $81,081 to $83,344.
From Monday’s US close near $81,855, bitcoin was up about 0.7%. Ether was near $2,432, up 1.1% on the UTC day.
What drove the session
Earnings, not tech, lifted Wall Street. Yahoo Finance data at the close showed the Dow Jones Industrial Average up about 1% at 52,497 and the S&P 500 up 0.3% at 7,713, while the Nasdaq Composite ended flat. Equifax, Hasbro and 3M all rose after quarterly profits beat forecasts, AP reported.
The VIX fell to about 17.5 from 18.4.
Oil set the rhythm. Brent came close to $112 a barrel in the morning before reversing, AP said. Crude first plunged and then turned higher again on conflicting reports about the war in Iran, CoinDesk’s live blog noted, with a peace report denied by 15:34 UTC.
Brent ended near $109, down about 0.4%.
Bitcoin’s move came in one hour. After drifting to about $81,100 in Asia, as Tuesday’s First Print tracked, it rose through the 13:30 UTC cash open and hit $83,339 in the 14:00 UTC hour.
That hour traded about 436 BTC on Kraken, nearly three times the hour before. Crypto markets saw about $125 million of short liquidations between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC, Cointelegraph reported, citing CoinGlass data.
Put simply, traders betting on a fall were forced to buy back, and that buying, not new demand, did much of the lifting; what a liquidation is explains the mechanics.
It was a match struck in a draught. By the 15:00 UTC hour bitcoin was back at $82,127.
Crypto stocks did better than the coin. Strategy shares rose about 4.9% and Coinbase’s about 1.4%, while BlackRock’s IBIT added 0.9%. The US 10-year Treasury yield closed near 5.12%, about 2 basis points lower on the day.
Derivatives
Leverage built a little. Deribit’s bitcoin perpetual open interest was about $864 million near 20:01 UTC, up from about $839 million at Monday’s close. Funding was 0.0031% per eight hours on Deribit and 0.0071% on OKX: positive, and lower on Deribit than Monday’s 0.0063%.
Implied volatility eased again. Deribit’s DVOL index was about 37.1 in the 20:00 UTC hour, down from about 38.3 in the 12:00 UTC hour. In plain English, the spike did not make options traders expect a bumpier month.
Friday’s weekly book carried about 14,816 BTC of open interest at our read, with puts outnumbering calls about 1.11 to one. The largest strike is still the $78,000 put at about 2,060 BTC, followed by the $80,000 put at about 914 BTC and the $90,000 call at about 797 BTC. The 30 October monthly, at about 135,300 BTC, leans to calls, with the $95,000 call the biggest line.
The levels
The level to watch is $83,339. Acceptance above Tuesday’s high would open the way to the $84,250 line; a sustained reclaim of $84,250 remains the first serious challenge to the Bearish Brief call.
Below, the afternoon low at $82,127 is the first marker, then the Asia low near $81,100. A sustained break below $81,100 would put Sunday’s $80,568 low and the $80,000 line under pressure again, with the $78,000 put line on Friday’s book behind them.
The alternative read: bitcoin printed a higher high than Monday and held most of its gain while open interest rose and DVOL fell. That is a market finding buyers, not one being forced out. It still needs $83,339 first, then $84,250.
The latest ETF Desk showed spot bitcoin ETFs taking in $526.7 million on Monday; Tuesday’s Farside row was still blank at 20:02 UTC.
Wednesday brings Solana’s Alpenglow consensus switch, with epoch 1064 starting at about 15:00 UTC (17:00 CEST); our Alpenglow explainer covers it, and the week-ahead calendar has the rest of the week. For Monday’s session, see Monday’s US-close Market Read.
As of 20:01 UTC, BTC is trading near $82,400.
Related: Wednesday's First Print: Seoul rebounds, bitcoin drifts
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.