Bitcoin has been stuck below $78,000 since Tuesday, and Ethereum hasn't done much either. So crypto traders did what they always do when the majors stop moving and went hunting for action somewhere else.
Friday's hunting list: AI tokens and HYPE.
NEAR jumped 28.5% on Friday while FET added 11.4%. Both fall under the loose "AI token" label, which has more to do with branding traders find easy to buy than with running real AI workloads.
When narrative-driven money is back in the game, branding is enough.
The flip side was privacy coins like DASH, ZEC and XMR, which had been the hot trade earlier in the week. By Friday they had given back most of those gains, which is classic rotation as speculative money moves to whatever's running.
For investors trying to read these moves, Market Briefs breaks down what they actually mean in five minutes a day, plus a free investing masterclass thrown in.
The bigger story Friday was HYPE, which hit a record high after rallying roughly 60% since Tuesday.
Two forces did the work. Short sellers got squeezed out of their positions as the price climbed, which forced more buying from the same crowd that bet on the way down.
On top of that, institutional money has been flowing in since U.S. spot HYPE ETFs launched earlier this month.
The altcoin season indicator, a rough measure of how much money is flowing to altcoins versus Bitcoin, sits at 38 out of 100, which is still bitcoin's market. A real altseason usually needs that number above 50 or 60.
Bitcoin's implied volatility, the market's expectation of how big future price swings will be, keeps falling as traders sell call options. The most active put options, which are bets that bitcoin will fall, cluster at the $71,000 to $77,000 strikes on Deribit.
That's a cautious posture, with traders buying downside protection instead of betting on a breakout.
Meanwhile, U.S. stocks are partying. The Dow hit a record high Friday and the Nasdaq 100 is up 3% since Tuesday's low, with falling oil doing most of the work.
If that risk-on mood holds, bitcoin probably doesn't sit at $77,000 forever. Money that flows into Ethereum and other majors often follows when the risk appetite comes back.
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