Bitcoin holds steady after Sunday’s rally, though full-fledged reversal may take longer

Bitcoin BTC$62,742.20 held above $63,000 on Monday, looking to build on a 4% Sunday rally spurred by Strategy (MSTR) Executive Chairman Michael Saylor hinting at further purchases of the largest cryptocurrency. Saylor’s stance is a signal markets take seriously given the company’s track record of aggressive accumulation.

Bitcoin’s stability is breathing life back into lesser-tracked corners of the market. Audiera’s BEAT token has surged 78% in the past 24 hours and Siren’s SIREN added 33%, making them the two best-performing coins among the top 100 by market cap. Audiera is a Web3 entertainment and rhythm gaming platform built on BNB Chain that treats AI characters and virtual idols as economic participants. Siren is also a BNB-based Web3 AI project. The catalysts for the moves are unclear.

The broader market recovery hinges on what bitcoin does next. It is currently trading near its 200-week simple moving average, a level that has historically acted as a long-term support and a key battleground between bulls and bears at major cycle turning points.

“The sentiment index plummeted to 8, once again showing single-digit values on Monday, following a two-month hiatus and failed attempts to consolidate in positive territory. Judging by the dynamics near Bitcoin’s 200-week moving average and the sentiment index, the situation resembles mid-2022,” Alex Kuptsikevich, the chief market analyst at FxPro said in an email.

“Under similar conditions at that time, the downward momentum weakened, but a full-fledged reversal did not occur until many months later,” he wrote.

Derivatives positioning

• Bitcoin’s futures open interest collapsed to 716,000 BTC from a record 901,000 BTC just four days ago, a stark illustration of how brutally last week’s price crash wiped out leveraged positions across the market.
• One silver lining: the decline in open interest suggests traders largely didn’t pile into new shorts during the selloff, meaning the move was driven by forced long liquidations rather than aggressive bearish conviction.
• Ether (ETH) tells a similar story. Open interest has pulled back to 14.58 million ETH from 15.98 million ETH late last month.
• BCH$205.70 is the standout coin of the past 24 hours. Open interest has jumped over 13% in the past 24 hours to 1.64 million BCH, the highest level since July 2023, even as its price bucked the recovery with an 8.3% slide. Rising open interest against a falling price typically signals short accumulation, and BCH’s negative 24-hour cumulative volume delta confirms it: Traders are actively shorting at market prices rather than placing limit orders. The setup points to persistent bearish sentiment and potential for further losses.
• Canton Network’s CC token is also seeing an uptick in open interest.
• On the volatility front, the stabilization in bitcoin is showing up in so-called fear gauges. The 30-day annualized implied volatility index BVIV has retreated to 50% from a peak of nearly 59% on Friday, suggesting the acute stress is fading and conditions are supportive of at least some consolidation. Ether’s implied volatility pulled back to 69% from 75%.
• Options market sentiment has shifted noticeably. The five most actively traded instruments on Deribit in the past 24 hours are all calls, including a $170,000 strike expiring Dec. 25. That’s a bet bitcoin will rally above that level before year-end. These deep out-of-the-money calls function as cheap lottery tickets: small premium, long odds and a massive payoff if the trade comes good.
• One risk factor remains. The dealer gamma profile around $60,000 continues to point to a setup where market makers may be forced to trade in the direction of price moves to rebalance their books, a dynamic that could amplify swings in either direction.

Token talk

• Zcash (ZEC) has rebounded 45% from last week’s low after developers proposed a fix for a critical counterfeiting bug in its privacy-focused Orchard pool.
• The Ironwood proposal would move users to a new, repaired privacy pool and let anyone running Zcash software verify that no more than the correct amount of ZEC exists.
• As coins migrate out of the old pool, any counterfeit ZEC would either be exposed or stranded and destroyed, potentially revealing whether the flaw was ever exploited, though developers say abuse is unlikely.
• Elsewhere, Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT briefly overtook ether (ETH) in market capitalization over the weekend as the latter fell alongside the broader market.
• Ether slid from $2,000 to just over $1,500 from Friday to Sunday, bringing it to a $183 billion market cap compared with USDT’s $186 billion. The token has recovered since, bringing it back above USDT, though it remains far below bitcoin BTC$62,742.20‘s $1.2 trillion level.