Crypto traders were in a jubilant mood on Thursday morning as bitcoin zoomed above $119,000, setting its sights on a new record high.

The altcoin market also heated up; tokens like monero (XMR) and aptos (APT) posted double-digit gains while zcash (ZEC) continued Wednesday's surge with a 58% move in the past 24 hours to $143.

The catalyst for crypto's rise was a mixture of ETF inflows, gold's rise and general positive sentiment towards risk assets.

Derivatives Positioning

• The BTC futures market is showing a strong and sustained bullish trend, with key metrics reaching new highs. Open interest has climbed to an all-time high of $32.6 billion, reflecting a significant increase in trader exposure, with Binance leading the way at $13.6 billion.
• This record-high interest is supported by a stable 3-month annualized basis, which has settled around 7%, indicating that the basis trade remains profitable and reinforcing the positive market sentiment. The combination of these two metrics suggests that recent price action is being driven by strong, conviction-based bullish positioning rather than short-term speculation.
• The BTC options market is presenting a complex and contradictory picture of sentiment. While the 25 Delta Skew for short-term options continues its downward trend, now at just 3.25%, suggesting that traders are willing to pay a premium for puts to hedge against downside risk, the 24-hour Put/Call Volume tells a different story.
• Calls are still dominating the volume at over 56%, indicating that a majority of traders are actively positioning for a rally rather than a decline.
• Meanwhile, BTC's funding rate on major exchanges is hovering between an annualized 9% to 10%, indicating healthy demand for leveraged long positions.
• However, a significant outlier is Deribit, where the funding rate has spiked dramatically to over 60%. This isolated but extreme spike suggests intense, concentrated demand for long positions on that platform, but the overall market, including altcoins, does not yet appear to be overheated with average funding for top 30 coins by market capitalization at around 10% annualized, as per Coinglass.

Token Talk

By Oliver Knight

• Plasma founder Paulie Punt has refuted claims that the recently-issued XPL token had been sold by team members, despite on-chain data suggesting the contrary.
• Paul stated that no members of the Plasma team have sold their XPL holdings since launch. According to him, all investor and team allocations are subject to a three-year lock-up with a one-year cliff, meaning they cannot be accessed or sold within that timeframe. He emphasized that the circulating claims of insider unloading were unfounded.
• The Plasma founder also pushed back against characterizations that the team was primarily made up of “ex-Blast” employees. Of the roughly 50 team members, only three had prior stints at Blur or Blast, he said. He noted that the group also includes professionals with backgrounds at Google, Facebook, Square, Temasek, Goldman Sachs, and Nuvei, underscoring the project’s broader pedigree.
• Another point of contention has been Wintermute, a well-known crypto trading firm often engaged as a market maker for new projects. Paul denied that Plasma had contracted with Wintermute for market-making or other services, saying the company has no more information about Wintermute’s XPL holdings than the public.
• Pseudonymous researcher ManaMoon had initially claimed that over 600 million XPL tokens have been transferred from the project’s vault to exchanges since launch.
• XPL has performed relatively poorly since launch; sliding from a high of $1.68 to $0.97 while daily trading volume has remained steady at $2.6 billion.

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