Bitcoin, ether little changed before U.S. inflation report: Crypto Markets Today

Bitcoin BTC$68,669.09 rose to test $67,000 early Friday and was quickly rebuffed, though it remains about 1% higher since midnight UTC with ether ETH$2,034.65 rising half as much. The derivatives market, too, is showing signs of positivity.

The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is little changed, up just 0.7% in the period.

While the gains mark a recovery from yesterday’s U.S. trading, which saw the cryptocurrency market fall back toward last week’s lows, bitcoin is still on track for a fourth straight week of declines. That’s the longest falling streak since mid-November.

Meantime, a slowdown in trading and fading volatility are weighing on volumes.

It’s likely that traders are looking to the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) print coming later today for hints on direction. A higher-than-forecast reading could lift bond yields and the dollar, putting additional pressure on risk assets. A lower reading might signal the easier conditions that are more conducive to risk-taking.

Even so, it will take quite a jump to push the bitcoin price to $85,000, a level that Deribiti’s chief commercial officer, Jean-David Péquignot, said would signal the largest cryptocurrency’s long-term rally is no longer “broken.”

Derivatives

• The market is showing signs of renewed life as open interest (OI) dropped to $15.5 billion, suggesting a cleanup of late-cycle leverage.
• Perpetual funding rates have flipped neutral to positive across all venues, now ranging between 0% and 8%. This broader optimism is being mirrored by institutions, as the three-month annualized basis spiked to just over 3%, signaling the first real uptick in professional conviction.
• The bitcoin options market shows returning call volume at 65%, even as the one-week 25-delta skew eased to 17.9%. Despite this “bottom-fishing” activity, the implied volatility (IV) term structure remains in short-term backwardation, confirming that traders are still paying a high “panic premium” for immediate downside protection.
• Coinglass data shows $256 million in 24-hour liquidations, split 69-31 between longs and shorts. Bitcoin ($112 million), ether ($52 million) and others ($16 million) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations.
• The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $68,800 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price rise.

Token Talk

• PUMP, the token of Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, is up more than 5% in the past 24 hours.
• The platform rolled out a new way for token communities to allocate fees directly through its mobile app with the inclusion of GitHub account integration.
• The integration offers a simpler way for creators to assign automatic payouts generated by a token’s community, and more social features are expected to be introduced in the future.
• In practice, this means communities can start supporting creators on GitHub through a portion of the fees generated. To receive the fees, creators will need to claim them through the platform’s mobile app.
• Pump.fun was largely behind a major memecoin trading frenzy early last year that saw its monthly trading volume surge past $11 billion. Volume has since plunged to $1 billion last month, according to DeFiLlama data.