The crypto market fell during the European morning, with bitcoin BTC$92,317.88 dropping to $91,200 after hitting a weekly high of $94,200 on Wednesday.

The decline was confined to crypto: U.S. equities were little changed in pre-market trading and the FTSE100 index rose 0.15%.

The sell-off can be attributed to record outflows from BlackRock's IBIT bitcoin ETF, with another $113 million worth of outflows being recorded on Thursday as crypto bulls failed to wrangle control of the market from the bears.

The Fear and Greed index remains depressed at 25/100, failing to find its way into a neutral zone after slogging away below 40/100 for more than a month.

Derivatives positioning

• The BTC futures market shows sustained caution and aggressive deleveraging. Open Interest (OI) has dropped to $21 billion from $25 billion a month ago, signaling a reduction in trader leverage and risk exposure.
• This deleveraging is occurring alongside consistently low market derivative metrics: The three-month annualized basis holds steady at 4%-5%, and funding rates are stable at 5%-6% across major venues, with neither metric showing a meaningful change over the past month.
• BTC options show a sustained bullish bias despite volatility dropping back. The implied volatility (IV) term structure for the near term fell, moving away from backwardation toward a more typical contango, indicating a decline in expected immediate, extreme price movements.
• Nevertheless, the volume skew remains bullish, with 24-hour put/call volume still 57% in favor of calls. Crucially, the one-week 25-delta skew has seen a slight recent rise to 8%, confirming that traders are still paying a premium for near-term upside exposure.
• Recent BTC price volatility led to $280 million in 24-hour liquidations with $200 million being long positions. ETH ($88 million) and BTC ($85 million) lead in terms of notional liquidations.
• The BTC/USDT liquidation heatmap on Binance suggests a large amount of long liquidations at around $90,600, according to Coinglass data. That's the level to watch out for, in case of a price drop.

Token talk

• The altcoin market performed equally poorly over the past 24 hours as TAO, HYPE and NEAR all lost more than 6.5% of their value.
• But the bigger story was in ether ETH$3,174.63 price action. Less than a day after its highly-anticipated Fusaka upgrade, ETH gave back much of its early gains — dropping by 2.62% since it hit the day's high at 03:00 UTC.
• The muted ETH price action paints a telling story for the broader altcoin market as even supposedly bullish catalysts are falling on deaf ears.
• The CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index mirrored ETH's decline while CDMEME, CoinDesk's memecoin index, slid 5.8% in the past 24 hours.
• CoinMarketCap's "Altcoin Season" indicator stagnated at 21/100, seemingly remains trapped in a bearish zone with traders opting for the consistency of bitcoin and the safety of stablecoins.
• Two outliers to Friday's slide: privacy coin zcash ZEC$371.89 and TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain, which rose by 4.7% and 1.8%, respectively.
• In ZEC's case it is bouncing from a corrective phase where it became "oversold" on the relative strength index (RSI). TRX, meanwhile, appears to be running its own race having posted gains across the daily, weekly and monthly timeframes.