Crypto Markets Today: Traders Seek Catalysts After Bitcoin?s Post-Fed Pullback

The crypto market tumbled back to the lower side of its range after the Federal Reserve's decision to slash interest rates by 25 baiss points.

The announcement, while bullish for macro assets in the long term, was arguably priced in by traders ahead of the event, with long exposure rapidly unwinding in the subsequent hours.

Now, bitcoin remains above the $88,200 level of support, trading at $90,350 as it looks for a catalyst to lift it above this week's stern level of resistance at $94,500.

The altcoin market continues to show weakness as several tokens lost further ground on their respective bitcoin trading pairs.

Derivatives positioning

• BTC's volatility expectations continue to drop with the Fed decision out of the way. As of writing, the annualized 30-day implied volatility, represented by the BVIV index, was 46.95%, the lowest since Nov. 13.
• The spread between ether and bitcoin 30-day IVs has risen lately, pointing to renewed market focus on Ethereum's native token.
• The VIX too has normalized following the November spike.
• On Deribit, BTC and ETH risk reversals remain negative across tenors, indicating a persistent bias for put options.
• Block flows featured BTC risk reversals and call calendar spreads and risk reversals and straddles in ETH.
• In futures market, open interest (OI) in ADA has dropped 10% in 24 hours, leading the decline in OI in most major tokens, including BTC and ETH. The capital flight points to a offloading of risk into the year-end.
• Funding rates for several top tokens, excluding BTC and ETH, have flipped decisively negative, a sign of traders chasing bearish short positions.

Token talk

• The altcoin market continued its negative trend on Thursday, retreating back into dangerous territory as the likes of ETHFI, FET, ADA and PUMP all lost more than 8% in the past 24 hours.
• The sell-off occurred at the same time as bitcoin and ether's respective drawdowns, although the percentage loss was higher as the altcoin market continues to lack liquidity following October's liquidation cascade.
• Two percent market depth on ETHFI for example is at around $500,000 on either side of the orderbook, meaning that a market order above that figure would move price by more than 2%, which considering the token has a market cap of $480 million is a relatively small trade.
• A handful of tokens bucked the bearish market trend on Thursday, this included monero (XMR) which rose by more than 2% as it continues to demonstrate a rich vein of form that can be attributed to wider privacy coin strength.
• CoinMarketCap's "altcoin season" index remains at a lowly 19/100, a far cry from September's high of 77/100 as investors continue to show preference for bitcoin and ether as opposed to more speculative altcoin bets.