coindesk.com 
The crypto market remains under pressure ahead of the pivotal U.S. inflation data, which is expected to show the cost of living rose to a three-year high of over 4% in May.
Tokens such as privacy-focused zcash (ZEC) and decentralized exchange Hyperliquid's HYPE have each dropped over 10% in 24 hours, a signal of risk aversion in the broader market. ADA, ONDO, BCH are other losers, dropping more than 4%. The CoinDesk 20 Index fell 3% in the period.
Bitcoin has retraced to under $61,500, nearly reversing the Sunday bounce that saw prices rise above $64,000 on some exchanges. More importantly, the cryptocurrency is trading below its 200-week simple moving average (SMA), a technical line widely watched by traders.
"The history of the 200-week moving average over the last 11 years (prior to this, the market had not dipped below it) shows that the average time spent near it is almost 11 months, suggesting a very long bear market," Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at the FxPro, said in an email.
Derivatives positioning
- Crypto futures volume over the past 24 hours rose 1.2% to $193 billion while open interest fell 1.5% to $102.27 billion. Liquidations, in contrast, jumped 38% to $418 million, with longs accounting for more than $300 million of the total as bitcoin slid back toward $61,000 yesterday.
- Bitcoin futures open interest (OI) nudged higher to 728,000 $BTC from 712,000 $BTC even as the cryptocurrency's price fell. Rising OI into a price decline points to fresh short positioning, a sign traders are positioning for a further drop.
- That conclusion is reinforced by negative perpetual funding rates and a negative OI-adjusted 24-hour cumulative volume delta, the latter indicating that sellers are hitting bids at market rather than placing passive limit orders.
- Solana futures OI rose to 69.58 million tokens, up nearly 2% on the day, closing in on the record June 5 peak of 71.57 million. Funding rates and CVD are negative, mirroring bitcoin's bearish setup .
- The bearish tilt extends across the board. Funding rates and CVD are negative for most major coins, including ether ($ETH) and $XRP. The lone exception is XMR, whose 24-hour CVD is narrowly positive.
- Bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility index is 51.21%, up from 45.8% on Monday, reflecting renewed uncertainty ahead of the U.S. CPI release later today. $ETH's implied volatility index has also ticked higher.
- On Deribit, short-term puts on both $BTC and $ETH continue to command a notable premium over calls, a sign that downside hedging demand remains elevated. One-week implied volatility is trading cheap relative to one-week realized volatility, a setup that favors options buyers.
- In block flows, a long butterfly was structured in the July 31 expiry, involving long positions in calls at the $70,000 and $80,000 strike prices and short 2x in the $75,000 call. The trade profits if $BTC consolidates around $75,000 through the end of July, implying the desk behind the position sees limited directional conviction from here.
Token talk
- Uniswap V4's total value locked (TVL), the deposits sitting inside a protocol, appeared to explode more than 350% in a day, with DefiLlama showing roughly $2 billion of apparent inflows concentrated on $BNB Chain. The jump was large enough to look like a major liquidity migration into the exchange.
- That wasn't the case, however. The figure was not a wave of capital flowing into the protocol. CoinDesk traced the spike to the Humanity Protocol's H token, which was hacked and minted in unlimited supply a day earlier. The worthless new tokens sat in a $BNB Chain pool and inflated the dashboard's dollar reading rather than representing real deposits. DefiLlama's founder was contacted for confirmation.
- Santiment, a behavioral analytics platform, said the broader market selloff has reached a historic buy zone.
- The 30-day market value to realized value (MVRV), a gauge of the average profit or loss for traders who bought a token over the past month, shows the typical recent buyer underwater on bitcoin by 10%, ether by 12%, chainlink by 9%, $XRP by 8%, and cardano by about 18%. The firm tags the first four "fair buy" and cardano "strong buy."
- jumped 12% in 24 hours after the onchain lending protocol raised $175 million, one of the largest funding rounds in DeFi history, co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit Capital with backers including Apollo and VanEck.
- The deal, structured as a token purchase, valued the protocol at up to $2 billion. The token later gave back some of the pop.
