coindesk.com
Bitcoin $BTC$77,828.34 fell 0.4% to around $77,900 since midnight UTC, after briefly touching $78,700 in the Asian morning. Ether $ETH$2,286.78 gained 0.5%, while the CoinDesk Memecoin Index lost 1.9%
Binance began phased withdrawals on Sunday, processing $4.65 billion of withdrawals against $1.01 billion of deposits, a net outflow of $3.64 billion, the exchange said. It has now covered around 95% of the $6.3 billion stolen, and the FBI formally attributed the theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group.
U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs lost $643 million on Friday, their largest daily outflow since June, according to Farside Investors, erasing four days of inflows.
Nasdaq-100 futures rose 0.8% after a 2% weekly drop, while Brent crude fell 4% to around $109 after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said President Donald Trump wants to resolve the Iran war peacefully. Traders now look to Apple’s earnings after the bell, Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections and Friday’s jobs report.
Derivatives positioning
- Churn, not positioning: Crypto futures volume jumped 56% over 24 hours to $111.8 billion, but open interest (OI) barely changed, and held largely steady at $137.1 billion. The market shows churn rather than positioning. Liquidations, the forced closing of leveraged positions, rose 77% to $140.2 million. Market orders were almost evenly split between buying and selling, with a slight tilt toward selling.
- $BNB exits: OI on Binance's $BNB token fell 5.31% against a 1.12% price drop, so traders closed positions and money left, even as Binance restores withdrawals in phases. Funding is positive, which means longs pay shorts.
- $NEAR leads losses: $NEAR fell 5.93%, the biggest drop on the list. Futures OI fell 4.84%, close to the price move, so the drop reflects price more than traders leaving. Liquidations of $3.23 million were high for its size. Funding is positive, which means longs pay shorts, and its cumulative volume delta, the net of market-order buying and selling, is the weakest among majors.
- $BTC, $ETH stuck: Trading volume rose 37% for bitcoin $BTC$77,828.34 and 83% for ether $ETH$2,286.78, but OI barely moved. $BTC OI was flat with price unchanged, and $ETH OI was flat while price rose 0.74%, so no new money came in. Funding is positive for both, which means longs pay shorts.
- Puts lead $BTC options: On Deribit, the three most traded $BTC options in the last 24 hours were all puts, led by the $58,000 put expiring Nov. 27. That’s far below the going spot price of about $78,000. The 25-delta skew, which shows how much more puts cost than calls, spiked after the Binance hack and has cooled since. However, puts still remain pricier than calls.
- $ETH calls on top: $ETH option activity was mixed, with three calls and three puts among the most traded. The $2,650 call expiring on Nov. 6led. Skews show bitcoin-like patterns.
Token talk
- Thorchain (RUNE), the cross-chain swap protocol, was the biggest loser in the CoinDesk 100,, falling 6.4% as the FBI, Secret Service and IRS Criminal Investigation urged node operators to block addresses linked to the Binance hackers, with co-founder JP Thor aguing against freezing ufunds. The token has lost around 17% over the past 24 hours.
- Only a handful of tokens rose on Monday, led by monero (XMR) at 1.7% and zcash (ZEC) at 1.4%, with tron TRX$0.3162 adding 1.0% even as onchain analyst SomaXBT traced around $242 million of the stolen Binance funds through its network.
- AI-linked tokens fell again, with grass GRASS$0.5744 down 4.5%, near $NEAR$4.1324 down 4.0% and kite KITE$0.1182 down 3.3%, even as Nasdaq-100 futures rose.
- Official Trump (TRUMP), the memecoin tied to President Donald Trump, fell 4.2% on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, with the project’s dinner for its top holders set for Nov. 22.
- CoinMarketCap’s altcoin season index stands at 46/100, down from last weeks pre-hack high of 60/100.
