Bitcoin's new all-time high masks muted futures activity

Bitcoin reached a new all-time high on Thursday, May 22, closing at $111,390 after briefly touching an intraday peak of $112,000. The milestone capped a 45% rally that began in early April, when BTC was trading at $76,450.

Before this uptrend, BTC had declined from over $100,000 in January to around $76,000, largely due to trade war concerns, particularly from aggressive tariff threats issued by the United States. In early April, however, President Donald Trump announced a 90-day suspension of those tariffs to facilitate trade talks. That policy shift marked the market bottom for risk assets, with BTC rallying over 45% in the weeks that followed to set new highs.

Traditional markets rallied in tandem. The SP 500 climbed more than 20%, while the Nasdaq jumped 27% during the same period.

Alongside BTC’s rally in recent weeks, the price of ETH has also experienced a similarly impressive performance. The price of ETH has risen from $1,470 on April 8 to $2,530 as of May 25. This marks a notable 72% increase in a span of seven weeks for the second-largest non-stablecoin crypto asset by market capitalization. This was also what triggered the largest amount of single-day short liquidations for the year so far, with over $670 million in total short liquidations at the time, as discussed in our newsletter two weeks ago.

Interestingly, despite BTC trading at all-time highs as of the time of writing, open interest (OI)  paints a more nuanced picture.

OI is the estimated notional value of all open futures positions, or the aggregate dollar value of outstanding contract-specified BTC deliverables. OI of BTC futures on Binance stands at $12.5 billion, nearly 10% lower than its record high of $13.7 billion from the second week of December 2024.

On the other hand, the aggregated OI of BTC futures on Bybit currently stands at $7.6 billion, which is still 15% lower than its record high of $8.95 billion from the second week of December 2024. Even more telling, Bybit’s OI is still down 10% from as recently as Feb. 21, when it hit $8.5 billion.