Dec. 9, 2024

CoinDesk 20 Index: 3,808.61  -4.59%
Bitcoin (BTC): $98,473.34  -1.38%
Ether (ETH): $3,861.90  -2.85%
S&P 500: 6,090.27  0.25%
Gold: $2,677.9  1.49%
Nikkei 225: 39,160.5  0.18%

Bitcoin is holding around $98,000 while altcoins slipped heading into Monday's U.S. trading session. Cardano's ADA, XRP, Hedera's HBAR and Litecoin's LTC bled 7%-10% over the past 24 hours, leading losses among the broad-market crypto benchmark CoinDesk 20 Index, which is 4.7% lower. The drop liquidated nearly $400 million of bullish derivatives bets across all digital assets, CoinGlass data shows. Positioning in options markets suggests range-bound prices through the end of the year, digital asset hedge fund QCP Capital said in a Monday report. "Although we’re still structurally bullish, spot [market] is likely to range here for the remainder of the holiday season," QCP analysts said.

Amazon shareholders push for a 5% bitcoin allocation to beat inflation following a similar initiative to Microsoft. "Though bitcoin is currently a volatile asset – as Amazon stock has been at times throughout its history – corporations have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value over the long-term as well as the short-term," the proposal by conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) reads. "Diversifying the balance sheet by including some bitcoin solves this problem without taking on too much volatility." The proposal came as a growing number of public companies add the largest crypto to their balance sheets, a trend spearheaded by MicroStrategy, Tesla and Block.

The 2024 U.S. election was a "major victory" for crypto, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday. This was a bipartisan effort, Garlinghouse argued, with the majority of candidates across the two aisles backed by Fairshake, a crypto political action committee (PAC), winning their seats. "Of the 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats the industry backed in congressional races, 85% won. It’s incredible,” he said.

When assets surge to lifetime highs or multimonth peaks, traders are often faced with the challenge of identifying key resistance levels, the price targets where the market could next take a breather. That's precisely the situation facing bitcoin (BTC) and XRP (XRP) traders.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, is trading at record highs near $100,000, meaning it's now in uncharted waters. XRP trades at $2.44, with the 2018 record high around $3.30 as the only chart resistance before we enter the price discovery mode like BTC.

One way to identify key resistance levels is to study the distribution of open interest, the dollar value of active option contracts, at various strike price levels.

On Deribit, the world's leading crypto options exchange, BTC's $120,000 strike call option is currently the most popular contract, with a notional open interest of $1.93 billion, according to data source Deribit Metrics.

A strike with the highest open interest often marks a resistance level because call sellers, typically institutions, face significant losses if prices rise above that point. As a result, they often act to keep prices from exceeding that level. Conversely, the strike level can also act as a magnet due to the hedging activity of market makers or entities tasked with creating order book liquidity.

Recall that before and immediately after the U.S. election, the $100,000 call was the most preferred in terms of notional open interest. The price has now consolidated around the six-figure mark.

- Omkar Godbole