BTC price holds gains, but lacks conviction as derivatives signal caution

The crypto market ticked higher on Friday. Bitcoin BTC$77,301.71 rose 1.25% since midnight UTC to trade at $77,250, and the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) added 0.7% with 14 members in the green.

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 CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) was the best-performing benchmark, surging by 1.8%, followed by the CoinDesk Computing Select Index (CPUS), which added 1.4%.
• CoinDesk’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 WLFI$0.05680, 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.
• CoinDesk’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.