Crypto Markets Today: Bitcoin Leads Broad Recovery as Traders Eye Possible Santa Rally

The crypto market enjoyed a much-needed boost on Thursday as the two largest tokens rallied, with the bitcoin BTC$90,413.61 price rising to $91,700 and ether ETH$3,126.50 to $3,030.

The gains followed Wednesday's strong recovery in equities. That was led by tech stocks like Alphabet (GOOG) and Nvidia (NVDA), with the Nasdaq Composite posting its best four-day streak since May.

Traders remain focused on bitcoin as opposed to lower liquidity altcoins. BTC's 5.4% gain over the past 24 hours outperformed 18 of the 20 largest crypto tokens by market cap.

This was reflected in CoinMarketCap's "altcoin season" indicator, which remains at a lowly 22/100, down considerably from October's high of 67/100.

Derivatives positioning

• Bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, dropped further back to 50%, almost entirely retracing last week's spike to 65%, TradingView data shows.
• Traders piled into a bullish year-end call-condor structure, ranging between $100,000 and $118,000 strikes, worth $6.5 million in premium, according to Deribit Insights.
• This signals expectations for a potential “Santa rally,” even as steady call overwriting around $100,000 and easing downside hedging kept implied volatility subdued.
• Open interest for bitcoin remained consistent with the past 24 hours' price gains, indicating that the move was spurred by spot buying rather than futures activity.
• Altcoin derivatives painted a different story: Open interest for ether ETH$3,126.50, solana SOL$133.51 and particularly zcash ZEC$465.90 rose disproportionately to suggest that traders are flocking to the risk-taking approach of buying with leverage, according to Coinalyze.
• Wednesday's total trading volume mirrored Tuesday's, and a slight lull going into Thursday can be attributed to the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.

Token talk

• The altcoin market, while in general lagging behind bitcoin, showed signs of strength on Thursday.
• The SKY token, previously MKR, rose by 10% as it began to show signs of a reversal from last week's low of $0.041.
• There were also gains for DASH, ETHFI and AVAX, all of which rose by between 6.7% and 7.7%.
• The optimism wasn't correlated across the entire market: ENA$0.2461 and TAO$295.10 both dropped by more than 2%, suggesting the optimism wasn't unanimous across the board.
• The crypto market's average relative strength index (RSI) shows it is edging toward "overbought" territory, with tokens like AVAX, SPX and PENDLE firmly in the overbought zone, suggesting that a pullback may be on the cards moving into Friday unless meaningful demand and volume can be sustained.
• The altcoin market ultimately depends on bitcoin's next move. If bitcoin can begin to break the downtrend that started in October and push back toward $100,000, altcoins will likely follow. However, if it gives back this week's gains and begins to fall into trouble at the low $80,000 level, altcoins will underperform and potentially break their own levels of support due to a low liquidity environment.