CCData's weekly ‘Chart of the Week’ highlights topical digital asset developments with vital commentary and analysis.
In this week's Chart of the Week, we examine BTC's daily returns so far in 2025. More days have posted positive returns than negative, highlighting Bitcoin’s resilience in the market. Monday has been the strongest day, averaging a 1.55% gain, followed by Friday’s 1.06%, suggesting bullish momentum leading into the weekend. Meanwhile, Sunday (date) recorded the most extreme downside, with an average return of -1.32%, making it the weakest day of the week.
BTC’s price movements have been largely influenced by key announcements from the Trump administration and a series of macroeconomic events, including the release of CPI data as well as the latest FOMC meeting. Despite these mid-week catalysts, Wednesday and Thursday (date) returns remained relatively flat, at 0.12% and 0.11%, respectively.
This week’s Chart of the Week highlights May’s correlation of daily returns between BTC, ETH and the SP500, falling to 15.8% and 18.2%, respectively, the lowest level since August 2022.
Digital assets have benefitted from a significant price appreciation following signs that tight monetary policy and high interest rates may soon reach their peak. This comes after the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, causing a stir in the banking system, and amplifying the interest in digital assets.
The depegging of USDC and regulatory issues with BUSD has led to Binance converting $1 billion of their Industry Recovery Initiative funds to BTC, ETH, and BNB, triggering further buy pressure for digital assets.
Bitmex's Spot XBT-USDT pair experienced a significant flash crash, causing the pair's price to drop to as low as $8,900 overnight. The order book recorded over 500BTC being sold below $60k, with a large SELL order of 100 BTC executing ~$10,000, indicating extreme losses for the entity who was selling at these prices, due to severe slippage to the tune of millions of dollars.
It’s likely that as price traded below a certain range, market makers pulled their liquidity which emptied the books, exacerbating the slippage being incurred as market depth reduced drastically. At first glance, it seems this type of extreme price action may be the result of a malfunctioning algorithm.
CCData’s CCIX volume calculation, which accounts for anomalous pricing with its 24-hour volume-weighted average calculation, prevented these market failures from impacting a composite BTC price. Additionally, Bitmex's derivatives pricing was not affected by the flash crash as a result of their usage of composite pricing, preventing liquidations and protecting futures traders.
This week's Chart of the Week casts a spotlight on Bitcoin's monthly performance since 2020. Since December, Bitcoin has recorded five consecutive positive monthly returns for the first time since Q1 2021.
In February, Bitcoin also recorded its highest monthly returns since December 2020, with an increase of 41.3%. With Bitcoin reaching new all-time highs in March, the asset is poised to extend its positive monthly streak to six months for the first time since March 2021.
Today, as BTC makes a new all-time high of $69244 according to CCIX, this week's chart of the week focuses on the significant long bias in the future's market, identified by abnormally high funding rates. Funding rates provide an indication of the prevailing market sentiment, showing the level of premium or discount of the futures price compared to the spot price.
Long position holders pay short position holders every funding period when funding rates are positive, and vice-versa. Observing the trend of substantially increasing funding rates highlights the imbalance of long positions on exchanges, and is a good indicator of frothiness and increased risk taking.
Binance spot market share has jumped from 31.9% at the start of 2024 to 35.7% as of 27th February 2024, its highest spot market share since August 2023. Numerous factors are likely to have driven this gain, including the zero-fee BTC-FDUSD trading pair, which has attracted significant interest to become the highest-volume trading pair in the market.
Additionally, the exchange still maintains the deepest liquidity amongst the exchanges, and has improved its brand image significantly since Richard Teng took over as a result of the SEC lawsuit settlement in November 2023. So far this year, Binance has averaged $411bn in monthly spot volumes, highlighting the heightened trading activity as a result of bullish market conditions.
In this week's Chart of the Week, we analyse the month-to-date returns of popular AI tokens. With the launch of OpenAI's first text-to-video product and reports of its founder seeking a capital raise of nearly $7tn to reshape the global semiconductor industry, attention has shifted to AI tokens in the crypto world.
Bittensor (TAO), which aims to create a decentralised machine learning network and has grown to be the largest AI token by market cap in recent months, saw its price rise by 36.8% to $640 in February. Meanwhile, AGIX, FET, and NMR, among other AI tokens, have returned healthy gains, seeing their prices rise 92.6%, 61.6%, and 63.1% respectively this month.
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