Crypto markets rose slightly Thursday morning, with Bitcoin holding around $110,000 and the total market cap at $3.78 trillion, as the 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 3.98%.
Bitcoin (BTC) has gained 1.6%, pushing the price to $110,000 and keeping it firmly within the $108,000-$112,000 range.
In a commentary for The Defiant, Farzam Ehsani, CEO and co-founder of VALR, suggested that Bitcoin’s path higher “is not guaranteed” as the same macro volatility that triggered gold’s rally due to its general perception as a defensive asset “could cap Bitcoin’s upside if it reignites broad risk aversion.”
Ethereum (ETH) is also up 1.5% to about $3,890, while all the other tokens in the top 10 by market capitalization are up slightly by between 1% and 5%. BNB is the biggest winner in the group, surging over 5% after President Donald Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had previously pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering.
Glassnode’s analysts noted in an X post on Oct. 23 that net-premium flows reveal “concentrated selling across the $109K–$115K range,” indicating that recent moves higher “are being used to hedge.” As the analysts explain, this suggests traders are “positioning defensively into strength while the market consolidates.”
As The Defiant noted in a recent newsletter, long-term BTC holders have been offloading significant amounts above the psychologically important $100K mark, with Glassnode reporting that over 28,000 BTC ($3 billion) has been sold in the past seven days alone.
Big Movers and Liquidations
Among the Top 100 crypto assets by market cap, ChainOpera AI (COAI) and Kinetiq Staked (KHYPE) are the biggest gainers, up 39% and 9.8% respectively.
As The Defiant reported earlier, the Kinetiq Foundation recently unveiled KNTQ, the official governance token for the Kinetiq protocol, the largest liquid staking platform on Hyperliquid’s Layer 1, HyperEVM.
Meanwhile, today’s biggest losers are Zcash (ZEC) and Hedera (HBAR), down 8.4% and 3.4% respectively.
Data from Coinglass shows that $345 million in leveraged positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, with $213 million of longs and $130 million of shorts wiped out. The largest single liquidation occurred on Hyperliquid in the ETH/USD pair, valued at $6.55 million.
Bitcoin led total liquidations at $59.95 million, followed by Ethereum at $108.47 million, with other altcoins accounting for $41.43 million.
ETFs and Macro Conditions
On Wednesday, Oct. 22, spot Ethereum ETFs saw outflows of over $18.7 million, according to SoSoValue. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, in the meantime, recorded over $101 million in net outflows.
On the macro front, U.S. Treasury yields rose Thursday as investors watched China trade news and eyed Friday’s inflation report. The 10-year yield hit 3.98%, the 2-year 3.465%, and the 30-year 4.563%, CNBC reported.
Also, rising borrowing costs have led JPMorgan and Bank of America to bring forward their forecasts for the end of the Fed’s $6.6 trillion balance-sheet runoff, or quantitative tightening, from later this year to potentially this month, Bloomberg has learned.
