The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum rose to new all-time highs of $2,041 on Feb. 20 spurred by rising buying interest. On-chain analytics, Glassnode indicated that ETH’s total value in the ETH 2.0 deposit contract just reached an ATH of 3,175,938 ETH.
Multiple Altcoins joined BTC and Ethereum (ETH) in establishing new all-time highs as both centralized and decentralized exchange tokens experienced strong breakouts. UniSwap (UNI) took a blast off, notching new all-time highs of $32.63. The UNI token is up 50.49% in the last 24 hours. SushiSwap also attained record highs of $19.65 on Feb. 20.
Polkadot (DOT) notched new all-time highs of $42.06 to rank fourth largest crypto, pushing Tether and XRP to 6th and 7th place respectively. Chainlink also reached record highs of $36.83. Ethereum trades at $1,976 at the time of writing.
Alex Kruger, crypto analyst cum economist stated his observations on the latest leg of the Bitcoin bull run:
Observations on the latest leg of this $BTC bull run
– Perp-spot basis flat (Microstrategy on the bid)
– Futures basis sky high (maybe Blackrock on the bid?)
– Implied vol falling
– 25D skew rising (market buying 3-6M downside)
Leverage is very high but inflows are gargantuan. pic.twitter.com/nR4uwo5YYa
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) February 20, 2021
– Perp-spot basis flat (Microstrategy on the bid)
– Futures basis sky high (maybe Blackrock on the bid?)
– Implied vol falling
– 25D skew rising (market buying 3-6M downside)
Leverage is very high but inflows are gargantuan. pic.twitter.com/nR4uwo5YYa
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) February 20, 2021
Implied volatility falling as indicated by the analyst may mean that market uncertainty is drastically reducing.
In options markets, skew is the relative richness of put options vs call options, expressed in terms of implied volatility. For options on the same underlying and with the same expiry T, 25d skew focuses on puts with a delta of -25% and calls with a delta of 25% to demonstrate this difference in the market’s perception of implied volatility.
A market in positive skew is “pricing in optimism” conversely, a market in negative skew is pricing in pessimism. Coin-holders or Miners may be buying puts to hedge downside risk. Therefore a rising 25D skew as indicated by the analyst is a bullish one.
Glassnode also indicated that the BTC number of addresses in profit (7d MA) just reached an ATH of 34,827,881.101 which may also be a bullish signal.