Altcoins outpaced a flat bitcoin in early Friday trading, with Celestia (TIA), Injective (INJ) and LayerZero (ZRO) leading the CoinDesk 100 gainers, while Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh gave no hint of the central bank's next move on interest rates.

Bitcoin (BTC, $81,905.56) was little changed since midnight UTC, trading around $82,100 after bouncing from a dip to about $81,600 at around 03:30 UTC. The asset sat comfortably above Thursday's brief break below $80,000, its first sub-$80,000 print in a month.

Ether (ETH, $2,415.78) added 0.5% to trade near $2,450, and the CoinDesk 80 (CD80) gained 0.46%, while the bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 5 (CD5) held steady. Celestia jumped 16%, Injective rose 7.7% and LayerZero added 7.3%, leaving four out of every five members of the CoinDesk 100 Index (CD100) higher and lifting CoinMarketCap's Altcoin Season index to 60 from 50 a day earlier. The gauge measures altcoin performance relative to bitcoin across the market, with higher readings signaling broader altcoin strength.

Asian equities steadied on Friday after Thursday's rout, with South Korea's Kospi closing 2.05% higher and Japan's Nikkei 225 up 1.39%. U.S. S&P 500 futures were little changed after the index snapped a three-day losing streak in the previous session.

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh declined to signal the central bank's intentions for its meeting later this month, speaking at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok. The odds of an October interest-rate increase dropped to about 15% from roughly 30%, according to the CME Fedwatch tool. Treasury yields were largely stable. Rate expectations are among the most closely watched macro inputs for crypto and other risk assets, and the meeting later this is the next scheduled checkpoint for those expectations.

Derivatives positioning

Trading volume cools, leverage resets. Crypto futures volume slid 20% over 24 hours to $200 billion, while open interest rose 2% to $142.21 billion. Liquidations dropped to $311 million from nearly $1 billion the previous day. Quieter trading with positions still building suggests the forced selling has run its course.

Sellers ease off. The 24-hour long/short taker volume ratio is balanced, compared with shorts making up 52% yesterday, a sign that aggressive selling has faded.

BTC, ETH and SOL gains lack fresh long bets. Bitcoin's notional open interest rose just 0.3% against a 1% price gain, meaning the number of contracts outstanding slipped slightly. Ether and Solana (SOL) show the same pattern, with open interest up by less than their spot prices. The moves look driven by traders closing shorts, not by opening new long positions.

XRP traders are cashing out into the rally. XRP's open interest fell 1% while its spot price gained 1.4%, meaning contracts were closed on the rise. Its 24-hour open-interest-adjusted cumulative volume delta, which tracks net aggressive buying and selling at market prices rather than passive limit orders, is also negative. The bounce has little support from derivatives traders.

ZEC leads with new bullish bets. ZEC futures open interest jumped 14% against an 11.5% price gain, so traders added contracts on the rise. Its open-interest-adjusted cumulative volume delta is the most positive among majors, a sign that buyers are the aggressors. TRX, XAUT and ETH also show positive readings, while BTC is neutral and UNI, HBAR and XRP are negative.

Funding signals a bullish tilt but no froth. Annualized perpetual funding rates for major tokens hover between 5% and 10%, showing a bias toward longs but nothing out of the ordinary. Funding rates are the periodic payments exchanged between perpetual futures traders, and unusual spikes have historically marked crowded positioning. The market is far from overheated.

Implied volatility keeps falling. BVIV, the 30-day implied volatility index for bitcoin, dropped to 38% from yesterday's high of 42%, and ether's implied volatility also fell. Options traders are pricing a calmer market, matching the funding picture.

Options traders hedge while eyeing ether upside. Decentralized exchange Derive pointed to a large bitcoin put spread that crossed the tape early this week, betting on a drop to $78,000. The $80,000 put is the most traded option on Deribit, the centralized options giant, so some traders are still buying downside protection. In ether, the $2,600 call is the most traded of the past 24 hours.

Token talk

Celestia (TIA), the modular data-availability network token, rose 16% to around $0.68, the biggest gain in the CD100 and its highest level of 2026. The token has advanced about 59% over four weeks, with the rally coinciding with Celestia Fibre hitting 3.07 terabits per second in a throughput benchmark and the introduction of a proposed economic upgrade called the Sustainable Blob Economy. Data-availability networks store the transaction data that modular, rollup-based blockchains rely on, a role that has drawn growing attention as more projects split execution from data storage.

Injective (INJ, $8.2915), the finance-focused layer-1 token, climbed 7.7% to about $9.19. While there is no obvious, overriding narrative, there are three pending U.S. exchange-traded fund applications tied to the token, the kind of filings traders have tracked closely since spot bitcoin and ether ETFs opened regulated exposure to crypto in the U.S. CoinMarketCap shows $289.7 million of INJ volume over 24 hours, up 128% from the prior day.

LayerZero (ZRO, $1.8285), the cross-chain messaging token, gained 7.3% to about $2.24, extending a rally linked to its ATLAS trading infrastructure, which routes most of its fees into buying and burning the token, a design that ties token supply directly to protocol usage. Ether.fi (ETHFI), the liquid restaking token, rose 4.2%.

Starknet (STRK, $0.06233) was the weakest CD100 member, down 9.6% to $0.08 after an 11% gain on Thursday, while Stacks (STX, $0.3686), a bitcoin-staking layer token, fell 4.2%.

Larger names were mixed to higher, with Solana (SOL) up 1.2% to about $107, XRP up 0.5% and Monero (XMR) up 2.9% to about $565, while BNB barely moved.

Source: CoinDesk