Market Awaits Fed Decision as BTC Short-Term Options Bearish Sentiment Cools Notably

Odaily reports: Bitcoin rose about 0.8% since midnight (UTC) on Monday to $81,400, after briefly falling below $80,000. Ethereum gained 0.9%, Asian chip stocks led a tech rebound, South Korea's KOSPI rose 6.6%, SK Hynix climbed about 11% on roughly 7x year-over-year profit growth, and Nasdaq 100 futures rose 0.5%.The Federal Reserve is about to announce its rate decision, and the CME FedWatch tool shows the market sees about a 92% probability of rates being held steady. Traders will focus on Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference to gauge whether there is any possibility of a rate hike ahead. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows of $176 million on Tuesday, marking a second consecutive trading day of inflows.On the derivatives side, crypto futures trading volume rose 7.5% over the past 24 hours to $163.2 billion, open interest increased only 1.3%, and liquidations rose 38% to $183.6 million. Bitcoin rose 2.3% while open interest actually fell 0.1%; Ethereum rose 2.7% with open interest up 1.7%, indicating the price rebound has not yet been accompanied by large-scale new leverage. ZEC open interest grew 14%, higher than its 6.3% price gain over the same period, making it one of the large crypto assets with the most obvious new position building.In the options market, Deribit data shows that Bitcoin's one-week put/call skew has dropped from nearly 10% a week ago to less than 1%, indicating that demand for short-term downside protection has weakened somewhat, though the one-month, three-month and six-month tenors remain clearly skewed toward puts. Meanwhile, gold futures open interest fell 10%, while open interest for Tether's gold token XAUT rose 11.6%, showing divergent capital flows. (CoinDesk)