BTC Has A New All-time High

Daily Updates:

• For the first time ever, Bitcoin has soared past $110K and its January 20th all-time high of $109K, briefly touching $111.8K earlier today. 
• The most recent move comes as the GENIUS Act, the first major crypto regulatory bill in the US designed to regulate stablecoins, will now be debated on the floor of the Senate – with a bipartisan group of supporters looking to pass the bill before the end of the week.

‍

• Options markets for BTC remain bullish: vol smile skews still show a lopsided preference for OTM calls, though the steep 5% skew towards calls yesterday has slightly relented to a lower, but still significant 3%. The futures curve remains upward sloping (11.55%), with the market pricing in a higher future BTC price than the current spot price. 
• BTC’s term structure of volatility is more flat at the front-end with outright implied volatility levels across the term structure ranging between 45% and 50%. 

‍

• The move in BTC has dragged the altcoin market with it, as all majors, ETH, SOL, XRP and ADA, are up 2-4% respectively. 
• After briefly holding a less bullish outlook relative to BTC, ETH options markets are backing a continuation of the rally – put-call skew is is close to 6% in favour of OTM calls currently, while the futures curve has steepened sharply from under 4% yesterday evening now to 10.46%, almost as high as BTC. 

‍

• The rally across the crypto market firmly supports the view we have put forward since the beginning of the year: 

“Our in-house view of 2025 began with several reasons that crypto was uniquely poised to detach from the harsh macro backdrop driving the rest of the market. In particular, we set out three factors that could drive crypto assets:

• Macroeconomic conditions
• Supply and demand
• Regulation” 

• BTC’s divergence from US equities could not have been clearer than yesterday. While BTC surged to make multiple new highs in the space of 24 hours, the S&P 500 ended -1.61% at yesterday’s close – its lowest close all month. 
• The move down in the S&P 500 came following lacklustre demand in yesterday’s US government bond auction. The Treasury department carried out a $16B auction of 20Y treasury bonds, however a lack of demand for those bonds resulted in a coupon rate of 5.047%. That was beyond expectations of 5.035%, and far larger than the 4.613% average of the past six auctions. It also meant that yesterday’s 20Y auction had the highest yield since October 2023, a year when the Fed hiked interest rates four times. 
• The lack of demand is an indication from Wall Street about the ballooning deficit in the US – a key reason cited by Moody’s credit agency for their recent downgrade of US government debt. It is also a deficit that is likely to only get worse if President Trump is able to pass his “big, beautiful” tax bill, which is estimated to increase the debt-to-GDP ratio from 100% today to a record 125%, compared to a projected 117% under current law.
• Treasury yields across the yield curve surged by yesterday’s market close too – 30Y yields rose 12bps, while the 10Y tenor jumped 10bps to 4.6% – even higher than when President Trump reversed course on his reciprocal tariffs, citing “The bond market is very tricky… I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy”. 

‍

• Volatility Shares is set to launch the first non-leveraged XRP Futures ETF ($XRPI), on Nasdaq today.

‍

• Global asset manager VanEck, is set to launch the PurposeBuilt Fund in June, a private digital asset fund focused on tokenized Avalanche-blockchain based Web3 ventures. 
• The fund, led by VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund, will target liquid tokens and early-stage projects across Web3 sectors like gaming, finance, payments, and AI and open exclusively to accredited investors.

‍

• Crypto exchange OKX has launched xBTC, a synthetic wrapped Bitcoin token, on the  Solana, Sui, and Aptos blockchains. 

This Week’s Calendar:

‍

Charts of the Day: