Crypto Markets Today: BTC, ETH Hold Gains as Aster’s Leverage-Fueled Volume Hits $64B

Crypto majors bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) rose on Tuesday as the market begins to consolidate following Monday’s recovery.

Bitcoin is trading at $112,900 while ether is at $4,150, adding 0.78% and 1.1%, respectively, in the past 24 hours as futures open interest jumped from $29 billion to $31 billion in a sign of bullish bias.

Much of Tuesday’s activity is occurring in the altcoin sphere, with newly-touted decentralized exchange Aster racking up $64 billion in daily trading volume as traders rush to use the platform that offers up to 300x leverage.

Derivatives Positioning

by Jacob Joseph

• The market is showing signs of a potential shift back to a bullish bias as derivatives metrics, including open interest and basis, show a pickup.
• Overall BTC futures open interest rose to roughly $31 billion from a recent monthly low of $29 billion. This increase indicates a renewed interest from traders, with Binance still leading at $12.7 billion.
• The three-month annualized basis is also recovering, climbing to 7% from around 6%, which makes the basis trade more profitable.
• The BTC options market is still presenting a complex and somewhat contradictory picture.
• While the 25 delta skew for short-term options continues to drop, suggesting traders are paying a premium for puts and signaling a desire for downside protection, the 24-hour put-call volume is telling a different story.
• In a clear reversal from recent trends, calls now dominate the volume, making up 65% of the contracts traded. This sharp increase indicates that despite the cautious sentiment reflected in the skew, a significant number of traders are actively positioning for a short-term rally.
• This divergence highlights a highly polarized market, where a mix of hedging strategies and speculative bets creates a state of mixed sentiment.
• Funding rates on major venues like Binance and OKX have turned positive, rising to around 7% and 10% respectively. This indicates a growing appetite for leveraged long positions, where long traders are now paying shorts, a classic sign of positive market sentiment.
• While the funding rate on Hyperliquid remains volatile, the trend on key exchanges suggests that traders are once again becoming confident and willing to take on bullish exposure
• Coinglass data shows $316 million in 24 hour liquidations, with a 44-56 split between longs and shorts. ETH ($73 million), BTC ($70 million) and others ($29 million) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations. The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $115,000 as a core liquidation level to monitor, in case of a price rise.

Token Talk

By Oliver Knight

• The derivatives exchange battle between Aster and HyperLiquid is heating up.
• Daily trading volume on BNB Chain-based Aster has rocketed to $64 billion, dwarfing HyperLiquid’s $7.6 billion, DefiLlama data shows.
• According to BoltLiquidity core contributor Max Arch, the shift is due to Aster’s offering of between 100x and 300x leverage. HyperLiquid’s markets are mainly capped at 40x.
• “Traders are following the leverage, regardless of underlying platform quality, but we’ll see how the increased risk that comes with higher leverage caps impacts platforms like Aster long-term,” Arch wrote on X.
• Arch notes that around 6% of Aster’s trading volume can be attributed to wash trading, far less than some skeptics had estimated.
• The exchanges’ native tokens, ASTER and HYPE, have performed poorly over the past week; with the former sliding from $2.39 on Sep. 25 to $1.80, while HYPE is down from Sep. 18’s high of $58.92 to $44.32.
• The bearish token performance relative to trading activity can be attributed to a wider altcoin sell-off that led to the removal of $200 billion from the sector’s total market cap last week, according to CoinMarketCap data.