Crypto Markets Today: Altcoins Remain Subdued, MON Surges on Upbit Listing

The crypto market is still gripped by “extreme fear” following last week’s sell-off and the lack of a meaningful recovery, but assets on the whole traded little changed on Wednesday, with bitcoin BTC$87,830.49 changing hands at $86,600 and ether rising slightly to $2,900.

The biggest move across the 20 largest cryptocurrencies was 3% over 24 hours, demonstrating a relative lack of volatility this week compared with last, which led to a bruising double-digit drawdown across the board as investors sold into a void of liquidity.

CoinDesk Indices data shows that while the market has fallen in unison over the past month, the CoinDesk 10 Capped Index excluding bitcoin has tumbled by 36.8% year to date compared with the same index including bitcoin losing 29.7% of its value.

This shows that while altcoins have enjoyed very brief “altcoin seasons,” investors still prefer the safety and lower levels of volatility that bitcoin possesses.

Derivatives positioning

• Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index, BVIV, has almost fully retraced last week’s spike from 53% to 65%, as the sell-off stalled and market concerns eased. A similar pattern is seen in the ether volatility index.
• On Deribit, a large block trade crossed the tape involving a simultaneous purchase of the $220,000 strike call and the $40,000 put, both expiring on June 26, 2026. The trading entity is most likely positioned to profit from a volatility explosion over the next seven months.
• Broadly speaking, put spreads in BTC have been the most popular strategy among block traders over the past 24 hours. In ETH’s case, put the diagonal calendar spread has been preferred.
• Bitcoin put options continue to trade at a premium to the calls across all time frames. Ether options stand out with bullish, call bias starting from September 2026 expiries.
• In futures market, ETH and ZEC are the only major tokens to have seen some growth in open interest (OI) in the past 24 hours. OI in other tokens, including BTC, has stayed flat or dropped slightly.
• OI in CME’s standard bitcoin futures contract has slipped to 132.4K BTC, the lowest since April, indicating risk aversion among institutional investors. ETH’s OI has dropped to almost 2 million ETH, the lowest in over two months.

Token talk

• The altcoin market continued to consolidate on Wednesday as a period of calm and stability swept across what was a chaotic market just last week.
• The one exception to that rule was monad (MON) which went live on South Korean exchange Upbit after trading exclusively on Coinbase for 48 hours.
• MON has now doubled from its debut price of $0.023 as 24 hour trading volume on Upbit hit $370 million, beating Coinbase’s total of $274 million.
• The surge in activity from South Korea suggests strong retail participation in the rally, although that wasn’t the case in European or American markets as last week’s token sale struggled to sell out on Coinbase.
• It’s worth noting that new tokens are often very volatile because they tend to trade on hype as opposed to onchain metrics. That was the case in Plasma’s XPL token that rose on its debut to $1.67 before tumbling to less than $0.20 seven weeks later.
• The wider altcoin market remains subdued; ether ETH$2,939.64 traded up a tick to $2,900 and there was a slight loss in XRP, which is down by 1.3% in the past 24 hours.
• STRK$0.1422 has almost entirely wiped away its rally from earlier this month, sliding by more than 40% in the past week after it rose from $0.10 to $0.27 between Nov. 6 and Nov. 20.

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