As bitcoin, altcoin prices gain, derivatives signal skepticism over a sustained rally

This cautious stance is echoed by other chart analysts, who warn that bitcoin’s daily chart is currently carving out an “ominous bear flag.” If that pattern breaks to the downside, one analyst warned the next stop could be $54,000.

• Bitcoin’s 24-hour volume jumped 30% to $129.9 billion. Open interest (OI) held steady around $108 billion. Liquidations rose 41% to $212 million, with longs accounting for $118.4 million of the amount.
• BTC futures positioning has lightened notably since open interest peaked at 801K BTC on June 4. It now stands at 722K BTC, down slightly from Sunday. Ether OI shows the same pattern.
  XRP is the outlier. OI in the fourth-largest non-stablecoin token by market cap jumped to 2.35 billion tokens, the most since the October crash. Funding rates are marginally positive at around 4%, a combination that points to growing demand for upside exposure. On the down side, 24-hour CVD is negative, which weakens the bull case. It suggests sellers are hitting the bid with market orders and driving price action, rather than buyers passively accumulating. On the chart, XRP looks weak after a recent bear flag breakdown.
• SOL’s OI hit a record high of 72.11 million tokens, raising the odds of a volatile move in either direction. Funding rates and OI-adjusted CVD are sending mixed signals, similar to XRP.
  Among the top 25 coins, only BTC, TRX and ETH show positive CVD. Nearly everything else has negative value, a sign that shorts are leading price action marketwide.
• BTC and ETH 30-day implied volatility indexes remain in recent ranges, signaling calm markets with no rush into options for protection or speculation.
• In options flow, a trader bought a bull call spread on HYPE, betting on a rally above $100 and as high as $150 by year-end. The trade crossed on the decentralized derivatives platform Derive.
• On Deribit, BTC and ETH puts continue trading at a premium to calls, a sign of continued stronger demand for downside protection.

• The market capitalization for Taiko’s native token, TAIKO, collapsed by nearly 30% to $14 million after the Ethereum layer-2 network halted its chain and told users to withdraw funds after an attacker exploited its bridge.
• The attacker walked away with about 2 million TAIKO, worth roughly $170,000, and reportedly moved these coins to the MEXC exchange.
• The protocol said that its chain-state verification mechanism was breached. In other words, the security assumptions supporting all Taiko bridges, technologies that help move coins across blockchains, were no longer dependable.
• Cross-chain bridges have emerged as the biggest security risk to DeFi users this year. April’s $292 million KelpDAO hack, one of the biggest of this year, was also a bridge exploit.