Bitcoin steadies near $81,700 as memecoins lead a broad altcoin rebound
Bitcoin rose 0.5% to around $81,700 since midnight UTC on Thursday, recovering from a low near $81,000 and extending a cautious repair job across digital asset markets. The largest cryptocurrency was outpaced by the wider market: the CoinDesk 80 altcoin index added 0.7% at the index level, memecoins climbed 2.9% as a sector, and frog-themed token pepe jumped 13% to lead the rebound, according to CoinDesk data.
The recovery follows a bruising, tech-led session on Thursday in which the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.6%, its steepest single-day decline since June. Asian equities steadied overnight, with South Korea’s Kospi adding 0.3% and China’s CSI 300 rising 1.7%, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.25%. The relative calm in equities appears to have given crypto traders room to rebuild positions rather than continue de-risking.
Ether rose 0.9% over the same period, while the broader altcoin complex, measured by CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season indicator, climbed to 58/100 from Monday’s low of 54/100, a sign that positive sentiment is trickling into the sector while bitcoin itself trades in a tight range.
The rebound is fragile, however, and traders are already looking past the weekend to the Federal Reserve’s meeting on Oct. 27-28. Brent crude sitting near $113 a barrel is keeping inflation worries alive, and the prospect of a hawkish Fed remains the single biggest macro risk hanging over the market. Readers tracking the macro backdrop can follow our ongoing Bitcoin coverage.
Derivatives markets cool off, but positioning tilts constructive
The most telling data of the session comes from the futures and options market, where the picture is one of a market resetting rather than retreating.
Crypto futures trading volume fell 19% over 24 hours and liquidations dropped 23%, a day after both metrics jumped sharply. That combination, falling volume alongside falling liquidations, typically indicates that the forced selling of the previous session has run its course. Open interest rose 1% even as prices barely moved, which means traders are adding fresh positions rather than simply closing old ones. The long/short taker volume ratio tilts only slightly toward shorts, at 51.6% against 48.4%, so the balance of market orders is close to even.
The OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD), which tracks whether market orders are predominantly buys or sells, points to a bullish reset. On Thursday most tokens ended the day below zero, with the weakest near -0.12%. Today, almost all are within 0.05% of zero. The exception is Tether Gold (XAUT), sitting around -0.25%, where market sells continue to dominate.
Bitcoin and ether both saw quiet rebuilding. Futures open interest rose about 1% in each while prices barely moved, indicating a modest build in new positions. Liquidations fell sharply, by roughly two-thirds in bitcoin and a third in ether. Bitcoin funding rose to 0.0067% from 0.0041%, meaning longs are paying a little more to hold their positions. Ether funding is flat.
Two funding stories stand out. First, BNB and SUI flipped back to positive funding after shorts were paying longs on Thursday, at -0.0048% and -0.0036% respectively; today all three of BNB, SUI and DOGE carry positive funding, and prices rose in each, so longs have resumed paying to hold. Second, de-risking continues in Zcash (ZEC), Solana (SOL), XRP and DOGE, where open interest fell by more than price alone explains. ZEC is the sharpest case: open interest slid 8% on a 1.5% price drop, the second consecutive day of heavy exits, a pattern consistent with capital flight rather than routine profit-taking.
Monero’s funding spike, which earlier in the 24-hour window was the hottest on the heatmap, has since cooled back to normal levels, easing the leverage build-up flagged previously.
Options market splits: bitcoin upside calls versus ether put demand
The options market is telling two different stories about the two largest cryptocurrencies.
In bitcoin, the most traded option was the Nov. 27 $98,000 call, followed by the Dec. 25 $88,000 call. Five of the six most-active contracts are calls, all struck above the market, and the only put among them is a $76,000 contract expiring Oct. 30. That is a book skewed heavily toward upside speculation, or at least toward hedging and positioning for higher prices over the next several weeks.
In ether, puts take the top two spots, led by the Oct. 26 $2,200 put with roughly 9,000 contracts traded. The volume data does not reveal whether these were buys or sells, but the skew data fills the gap. Ether’s one-week 25-delta put-call skew is near 13%, meaning puts cost substantially more than calls, and it has climbed since early October. Bitcoin’s one-week skew has dropped to about 4% from a mid-month peak near 14%.
The divergence is notable. Bitcoin’s downside worry has eased materially over the past fortnight, while ether’s has grown, a pattern consistent with the heavy put activity in the second-largest token. It also frames the relative performance gap: bitcoin is up modestly while ether, despite rising 0.9% today, is carrying a heavier defensive premium in its derivatives.
Meanwhile, new money keeps entering commodity perpetuals. Open interest rose in gold, silver and crude oil for a second day. Gold and silver prices fell, and funding is positive in both, meaning longs are paying to hold. Crude oil open interest rose alongside a 1.4% price gain, with negative funding, so shorts are paying. The rotation into commodity-linked crypto instruments fits the broader inflation narrative, with Brent near $113 keeping pressure on central banks.
Pepe leads the memecoin charge as altcoins bounce
Pepe rose 14% to lead the CoinDesk 100, the biggest single-day advance in a month for the Ethereum-based frog memecoin. The move extends its gains to 23% over the week and 16% over the month, a run with no clear catalyst. That performance sets it apart from the rest of the memecoin sector, where floki, bonk and shiba inu rose between 3.3% and 4.9% today but remain down as much as 16% on the month.
Pepe’s 24-hour trading volume totalled around $353 million, 10% higher than around the same time yesterday, suggesting genuine participation rather than a thin-orderbook wick. For a token with no fundamental catalyst, that volume profile is the difference between a speculative squeeze and something more durable.
Elsewhere in the altcoin complex, layer-1 tokens polkadot and cosmos both rose more than 5%, extending weekly gains above 6%. Polkadot remains down 2.5% in October while cosmos is up 3.6% on the month. DeFi tokens bounced after leading Thursday’s declines, with uniswap gaining 3.5% to around $7.25 and ethena rising 2.0% to around 20 cents.
Even the CoinDesk 100’s weakest monthly performers caught a bid. Doublezero rose 2.5% and monad gained 4.3%, though both remain deeply underwater, down 49% and 31% over the month respectively. Bounces of this kind in the most beaten-down corners of the market are typical of early-stage risk appetite returning, but they are also the first to reverse if sentiment sours.
What to watch: ETF flows, the Fed, and whether the altcoin bid holds
The immediate question for traders is whether Thursday’s $635 million outflow from U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, according to SoSoValue data, was a one-day reversal or the start of a trend. That outflow followed more than $1 billion of inflows across the first three days of the week, so the weekly net position remains comfortably positive. ETF flows have become the single most-watched proxy for institutional demand, and a second consecutive day of heavy outflows would undercut the recovery narrative faster than any derivatives metric.
The Federal Reserve’s Oct. 27-28 meeting is the next major catalyst. With Brent crude near $113 keeping inflation worries alive, the Fed’s tone on rates will matter more than usual for risk assets broadly, and crypto has traded as a high-beta expression of that trade all year. Bitcoin’s recovery to $81,700 is real but modest, and it sits well below the levels implied by the most-active upside call options.
The derivatives picture, taken together, is cautiously constructive. Open interest is rising while liquidations collapse, funding has normalised or flipped positive across most major tokens, and bitcoin’s put skew has compressed from 14% to 4% in a fortnight. Ether’s growing put premium is the main soft spot, alongside the continued capital flight from ZEC, SOL, XRP and DOGE. Pepe’s 13% jump and the memecoin sector’s 2.9% gain suggest speculative appetite is returning first, as it usually does, to the riskiest corner of the market.
Whether that appetite survives a hawkish Fed, or another leg down in tech equities, is the question the next week will answer.
