Market Awaits Fed Decision as BTC Short-Term Options Bearish Sentiment Cools Notably

Odaily reports: Bitcoin rose about 0.8% since midnight (UTC) on Monday to $81,400, after briefly falling below $80,000. Ethereum gained 0.9%, Asian chip stocks led a tech rebound, South Korea's KOSPI rose 6.6%, SK Hynix climbed about 11% on roughly 7x year-over-year profit growth, and Nasdaq 100 futures rose 0.5%.

The Federal Reserve is about to announce its rate decision, and the CME FedWatch tool shows the market sees about a 92% probability of rates being held steady. Traders will focus on Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference to gauge whether there is any possibility of a rate hike ahead. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows of $176 million on Tuesday, marking a second consecutive trading day of inflows.

On the derivatives side, crypto futures trading volume rose 7.5% over the past 24 hours to $163.2 billion, open interest increased only 1.3%, and liquidations rose 38% to $183.6 million. Bitcoin rose 2.3% while open interest actually fell 0.1%; Ethereum rose 2.7% with open interest up 1.7%, indicating the price rebound has not yet been accompanied by large-scale new leverage. ZEC open interest grew 14%, higher than its 6.3% price gain over the same period, making it one of the large crypto assets with the most obvious new position building.

In the options market, Deribit data shows that Bitcoin's one-week put/call skew has dropped from nearly 10% a week ago to less than 1%, indicating that demand for short-term downside protection has weakened somewhat, though the one-month, three-month and six-month tenors remain clearly skewed toward puts. Meanwhile, gold futures open interest fell 10%, while open interest for Tether's gold token XAUT rose 11.6%, showing divergent capital flows. (CoinDesk)