Bitcoin (BTC) price hit by swift Asia-hours selloff, stages partial recovery

The crypto market experienced a rare period of volatility during Asia hours on Monday, with bitcoin BTC$66,321.50 tumbling more than 5% to $64,270 shortly after midnight UTC before bouncing back to $66,300 by 11:00 UTC.

The selloff and subsequent bounce mirrored the action in U.S. equities. Futures tracking the S&P 500 index fell by 0.84% after opening on Sunday evening before starting to recover five hours later.

Gold futures did the opposite, rising on Sunday evening’s open to the highest since Jan. 30 before giving back some of those gains during European hours. Silver tracked the more expensive metal.

The surge in precious metals alongside weak performance in risk assets comes after U.S. President Donald Trump said he planned to impose new 15% global tariffs on trading partners and increased U.S. military presence near Iran fueled a rush toward haven assets.

Altcoins succumbed to low liquidity conditions overnight as solana (SOL) and SUI$0.9104 tumbled by between 7% and 8% before both bouncing back in European hours, a move that led to $270 million in altcoins liquidations, according to CoinGlass.

Derivatives positioning

• Demand for leveraged products remains tepid, as evidenced by total crypto futures open interest staying below $100 billion for over two weeks.
• Liquidations aren’t helping either. In the past 24 hours, crypto futures bets worth $500 million have been forcibly closed by exchanges due to margin shortages.
• Traders continue to deploy capital in futures linked to tokens associated with traditional assets such as gold. For instance, open interest in Tether gold (XAUT) futures has increased by 14% in 24 hours even as BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, DOGE and others continue to see capital outflows.
• ZEC and CRO are the only tokens boasting a 24-hour positive cumulative volume delta (CVD), a sign of buyer dominance. Meanwhile, BTC and other majors have negative CVDs, a sign of selling pressure overpowering buyers.
• Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, has jumped 9% to over 60%, indicating renewed jitters.
• Traders chased bitcoin put options at levels $58,000, $60,000 and $62,000 as Trump’s new tariffs injected fresh uncertainty into the market.
• On Deribit, bitcoin and ether puts traded at a premium to calls across all time frames, indicating lingering downside fears.

Token talk

• The altcoin market remains in the red on Monday after an exaggerated selloff was triggered by weakness in bitcoin and U.S. equities.
• Low liquidity conditions led to pump.fun’s native PUMP token losing 8.5% of its value before staging a bounce, while layer zero (ZRO) began selling off early on Sunday, losing 16.5% over 24 hours before recovering at 04:00 UTC.
• A small number of tokens outperformed the wider market. Restaking token ETHFI rose by more than 10% from Monday morning’s low.
• Telegram-linked toncoin (TON) showed more stability overnight, falling by just 3.6% before bouncing by 4.9%.
• CoinDesk’s DeFi Select Index (DFX) was the best-performing benchmark over the past 24 hours, losing just 1.84% while the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Select Index and CoinDesk Computing Select Index lost 3.56% and 3.23%, respectively.
• The altcoin market has largely been tracking bitcoin during February, though with a lack of liquidity that’s led to exaggerated moves. If bitcoin can put in a local low and bounce back above $70,000, for example, several altcoins are primed for extended upside after order books were wiped in early February.