Bitcoin briefly climbed to its highest level since mid-November before pulling back, while rallies in SUI, XRP and memecoins pointed to a renewed appetite for risk. BTC topped out near $94,800 on Monday before retreating to around $93,600, with traders split between shorting and positioning for a breakout toward $98,900. Altcoins rallied, with SUI adding more than 3% since midnight UTC to add to a 24 hour rally of 16%, while XRP continued its barnstorming start to the year with a 29% move to the upside since Jan. 1.
There has also been notable activity in the memecoin sector, with trading volumes on Solana-based token issuer Pump.fun hitting a record high of $1.27 billion. The CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) rose 1.5% to take its year-to-date gain to 19%. Crypto futures bets worth over $400 million have been liquidated in the past 24 hours. As of Monday, most of these were shorts, a sign that traders entered the New Year expecting a price slide.
BTC global futures open interest (OI) has held flat at around 660K BTC over 24 hours while OI in XRP jumped to 2 billion XRP, the highest since Oct. 11. The increase indicates capital inflows into the XRP market as the token’s price hit multiweek highs. Funding rates for most major cryptocurrencies remain moderately positive, indicating a bullish bias. On Deribit, put bias in BTC and ETH continued to ease as traders chased upside via calls.
Block flows featured BTC and ETH call spreads and BTC strangles. Memecoins are back on the map after a difficult year that culminated in drawdowns of more than 95% across the board. There has also been activity on BNB Chain as retail traders flock to predominately Chinese-language tokens that fall under the “Four Meme” umbrella, a phrase coined by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Aside from the memes, Sui’s native token, SUI, enjoyed some upside, rising by 3% since midnight and 16% over the past 24 hours after Mysten Labs, the developers behind Sui, published a research paper on private crypto transactions, leading the community to speculate over whether Sui will add privacy features to its blockchain.
CoinMarketCap’s altcoin season indicator is at 27,100, still firmly in “bitcoin season” territory, but a far cry from December’s low of 14,100, demonstrating early signs of strength across the sector. There are warning signs, however, with the average crypto relative strength index (RSI) flashing “overbought” to suggest that several altcoins may face a period of profit-taking in the short term.
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