Bitcoin is maintaining a position close to $78,000, reflecting a 0.23% drop starting from midnight UTC and a 2% decline across a 24-hour period, according to metrics from CoinDesk Indices. This downward movement erases Wednesday’s gains, leaving the leading digital asset 5.1% beneath its peak of $82,284 hit last week.
Ether trades slightly higher on the day at $2,470, yet shows a 1.9% decrease over the past 24 hours, whereas BNB experienced the heaviest losses among large-cap digital currencies by dropping 5.1%.
Out of the entire CoinDesk 100 roster, merely five assets show gains over the last 24 hours. The index itself retreated by 3.7% in the same timeframe.
The sell-off heavily targeted riskier assets. The CoinDesk Memecoin Index suffered a 10% drop over 24 hours, and the small-cap CoinDesk 80 declined by 5.1%, compared to a 2.3% drop for the bitcoin-centric CoinDesk 5.
Trading conditions have stabilized since midnight, with 86 members of the CoinDesk 100 trading downward and the benchmark down a modest 0.54%, indicating that most of the downward pressure occurred overnight.
Standard financial markets provide no clues for the move: S&P 500 index futures gained 0.22%, Nasdaq futures remained flat, gold ticked up 0.16%, and the Dollar Index stayed unchanged. United States producer price inflation figures for August arrive later today, with the Consumer Price Index scheduled for Friday to set expectations ahead of the upcoming interest-rate announcement next week.
Derivatives positioning
- Futures sentiment turns bearish again: Wednesday’s relief proved short-lived. The taker long/short volume ratio within crypto futures turned negative once more, mirroring earlier trends this week, as rising oil prices and elevated Treasury yields continue weighing on bitcoin. Cumulative futures open interest fell 2% to $139 billion, while trading volume rose by 5%, pointing to increased market churn and modest capital outflows.
- Bitcoin OI rises as price slips: Bitcoin values have declined by 1.5% over 24 hours. Meanwhile, open interest metrics from Velo reveal an increase of slightly more than 1%. Market participants frequently view this combination as an indication that traders are accumulating short positions in anticipation of deeper corrections. The 24-hour open-interest-adjusted cumulative volume delta registers as negative, signaling that sellers are demonstrating more aggression and placing short trades via market orders rather than passive limit orders.
- Open interest declines across most majors: Open interest has decreased for the majority of leading tokens, including ETH, SOL, TRX, ZEC, and BNB, accompanied by negative 24-hour cumulative volume deltas. DOGE and SUI exhibit the most pronounced negative cumulative volume deltas among major digital assets.
- Funding rates still favor longs: Conversely, annualized funding rates paint a different picture. For the majority of prominent cryptocurrencies, these rates maintain a modest positive stance near 5%, demonstrating that perpetual contracts trade at a premium relative to the index value and pointing toward a preference for holding bullish long positions. LTC and SHIB currently display negative rates.
- Implied volatility stays contained: Even though the 30-day implied volatility indexes for both bitcoin and ether currently track above their respective 50-day and 100-day moving averages, there are no indicators of accelerated growth within these metrics. This suggests anticipation of market stability despite significant macroeconomic reports like the U.S. PPI and CPI arriving within the next 24 hours.
- Puts lead options flow: Within options listed on Deribit, the BTC put option at the $70,000 strike price expiring on September 18 represents the most active contract, followed closely by the $76,000 put expiring on September 11. A put contract supplies protection against asset depreciation, acting essentially as insurance against a market downturn. Regarding ether, the $2,400 put expiring on September 11 holds the highest trading volume.
Token talk
- Raydium, a Solana-based decentralized exchange token, paces the CoinDesk 100 for a second consecutive day, gaining 8.5% since midnight UTC and 3.6% across 24 hours.
- Conversely, the privacy sector experienced mixed results. Monero advanced 2.1% across 24 hours to reach $513.73 following a sluggish performance on Wednesday, whereas zcash dropped 2.36% and dash declined 3.23%.
- Venice Token trades 6.5% higher on the day at $24.20 yet registers a 12% loss over 24 hours, surrendering a significant portion of Wednesday’s record-setting rally.
- Lighter, a perpetual exchange token, retreated 15% across 24 hours to settle at $4.44, marking the second-deepest daily decline in the index following fartcoin.
- Curve DAO stands out as the steepest daily loser, dropping 5.7% to $0.34 and 8% across 24 hours, while starknet, monad, and IOTA all posted declines of roughly 5% since midnight.
- CoinMarketCap’s Altcoin Season gauge sits at 38 out of 100, climbing from its September 1 trough of 23 out of 100, but staying below the September 8 peak of 51 out of 100.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/10/bitcoin-trades-near-usd78-000-as-memecoins-small-caps-lead-a-broad-crypto-retreat.
