Bitcoin Stalls at $111K While Altcoins Surge: The Great Rotation Unleashed
Bitcoin's holding pattern sparks altseason frenzy as traders chase bigger gains beyond the king crypto.
Market Shakeup Underway
While BTC consolidates near the $111K level, alternative cryptocurrencies are stealing the spotlight with relentless momentum. Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano lead the charge with double-digit weekly gains that leave traditional finance returns looking downright prehistoric.
The Institutional Dance
Hedge funds and crypto natives pivot toward risk-on altcoin strategies—because why settle for single-digit moves when you can chase triple-digit explosions? Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts scramble to update price targets that became obsolete before their morning coffee cooled.
Regulatory Whiplash
Global watchdogs spin their wheels trying to categorize assets that reinvent themselves faster than compliance departments can draft memos. The FSA's latest guidance already feels like trying to regulate the internet with dial-up era legislation.
Zero-sum momentum game meets decentralized revolution—and somewhere in Zurich, a private banker just discovered what 'yield farming' means.
Derivatives Positioning
- The total open interest across all perpetual instruments increased overnight to $114 billion, data from Laevitas show.
- A liquidations heatmap for the BTC-USDT pair on Binance shows that bitcoin is trading between two significant liquidation clusters. Above the current price, a $90 million cluster of liquidations sits around the $112,200 mark. To the downside, the largest cluster is valued at $76.6 million, located around $110,000.
- According to Deribit options data, the 24-hour BTC put-call volume is 26.4K contracts, with calls accounting for 51.6% of the total. The contract with the highest volume is the $108K strike price put expiring Sept. 26.
- That's followed by the call at a strike price of $114K expiring on the same day.
- The funding rate heatmap on Coinglass remains positive for most assets, indicating a general bullish sentiment. The one exception is TRX, which has a negative funding rate, reflecting a -10.2% APR.
Token Talk
By Oliver Knight
- Bitcoin (BTC) dominance, a key metric when assessing whether the crypto market is in "altcoin season" has ticked down another notch to around 58%, having been above 61% just 30 days ago.
- The drop-off demonstrates a change in trader behavior: Typically altcoins perform poorly when BTC enters a downtrend, this time, however, many have held their value while some have outperformed the market's largest asset.
- Bitcoin is down by 2.91% in the past 30 days while the likes of ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) are up by 21% and 27.5%, respectively.
- While the gains have been driven by the adoption of several altcoins in corporate treasuries, they can also be attributed to a recalibration of the entire market.
- During BTC's rise to a $124,000 record high last month, the narrative was solely focused on bitcoin and it's perceived correlation with the well-performing tech sector in equities.
- It's worth noting that in previous cycles bitcoin dominance slumped all the way down to 39%, indicating that the altcoin resurgence still has some way to go.
- However, as liquidity flowed into BTC, several altcoins fell to record lows against bitcoin, leading to a number being "oversold" on technical indicators like relative strength index (RSI).
