The bullish sentiment continues to build in the crypto market as numerous altcoins post double-digit gains on a daily basis. Bitcoin’s spot price (BTC) on crypto exchanges also continues to push higher with the passing of each day and earlier today the price broke above $9,800, extending to $9,862 before pulling back to trade around $9,650.
Crypto market daily price chart. Source: Coin360
Recently published data from Skew Markets shows Bitcoin futures with a May 2020 and June 2020 expiry date rising to $10,000 and above at a handful of exchanges. This further reinforces the general belief that Bitcoin’s bullish trend will continue for the foreseeable future.
Listed BTC Futures/Perpetual Swaps. Source: Skew.com
Bitcoin futures Open Interest (OI) at BitMEX has also risen to a new high at $1.5 billion. Open Interest simply highlights the size of contracts that buyers and sellers have open on the exchange. The recent narrative amongst traders suggests that when OI reaches $1 billion the market dumps and Bitcoin price contracts.
Exchange BTC Futures Open Interest. Source: Skew.com
Generally, most crypto traders track the fluctuations in OI to determine the strength of bullish and bearish trends in Bitcoin’s price action. When Bitcoin price and OI increase in tandem analysts infer that the trend is strong, whereas the opposite conclusion is reached when the price, volume, and OI move against each other.
Interestingly, the $1 billion threshold on OI has been breached, yet Bitcoin price continues to rally higher each day.
Bakkt Bitcoin Futures-Total Open Interest & Volume ($). Source: Skew.com
OI has risen across a number of exchanges over the past few weeks and today Bakkt followed the trend as the number of open futures positions reached a record high at $13 million on Feb. 5.
The same phenomenon occurred at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where Bitcoin futures reached a new 5-month high at $249 million.
BTC USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
At the time of writing, Bitcoin traders are attempting to flip the $9,800 resistance to support. Achieving this goal would increase the likelihood of the price moving to $10,000 and once this level is reached, traders anticipate encountering resistance at $10,300 and $10,500.
Above this level, Bitcoin price could slice through the volume gap on the volume profile visible range (VPVR) with a target at $11,500.
Bitcoin daily price chart. Source: Coin360
The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $276.2 billion and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 64.3%. As the dominance rate fluctuates and Bitcoin struggles to gain above $9,800, altcoins have continued to press higher, producing double-digit gains.
Tron (TRX) rallied 11.08%, Binance Coin (BNB) gained 6.75%, and Ether (ETH) notched a 4.49% gain which brought the price to $212.96.