Bitcoin's dominance — its share of the total cryptocurrency market — is closing in on 60%, while the share held by USDT, the largest dollar-pegged stablecoin, has slipped to around 6.3%. Taken together, the two gauges point to a market growing more comfortable with risk, with traders moving out of cash and into tokens. Traders watch the ratio to judge whether capital is concentrating in bitcoin or spreading across the broader altcoin market.

The mood was reflected in prices, with crypto a sea of green ahead of Friday's U.S. jobs report. Bitcoin traded above $86,000 at 9:10 UTC, up 3.4% over 24 hours. Ether (ETH) changed hands at $2,707.01, and XRP, solana (SOL) and BNB also rose, though none kept pace with bitcoin. The bigger moves came further down the rankings, where SKY, AAVE and APT jumped 7% to 10%, making them the best performers among the 100 largest coins by market value.

Jobs Report and Treasury Yields in Focus

The nonfarm payrolls report, one of the most closely watched readings on U.S. labor momentum and a key input for Federal Reserve policy expectations, is due at 8:30 a.m. ET and is expected to show the U.S. economy added 90,000 jobs in September, down from 162,000 in August. The unemployment rate is forecast to hold at 4.1%, according to FactSet's consensus estimates. A stronger-than-forecast report could lift Treasury yields, revive interest-rate increase bets and pressure bitcoin.

The bigger question for bitcoin is how Treasury yields react — especially inflation-adjusted, or real, yields. Because real yields capture the inflation-adjusted return available in risk-free Treasurys, they set the benchmark for holding assets that pay no income, such as bitcoin. That's why analysts are watching both the jobs data and the Oct. 14 consumer price index (CPI) report.

"I am watching Friday's payrolls and the 14 CPI mainly for their effect on longer-dated yields. I use a 10-year real yield of about 3% as a monitoring level, and a sustained move above it would make a retest of $80,000 to $82,000 more likely than a run at $90,000," said Oliver Carding, head of marketing at Tesseract Group, which manages $500 million in assets.

Markets now see a 30% chance of a rate hike in October, down from 70%, after dovish remarks from New York Fed President John Williams and Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson. Lower odds of a hike tend to support risk assets like bitcoin. Those odds may not move much unless payrolls come in well above forecasts, according to some observers; a big upside surprise could revive hike bets and potentially put pressure on bitcoin.

Derivatives Positioning

BTC open interest — the total value of outstanding futures contracts — picked up to $22.4 billion from $20.9 billion the previous day, and funding rates, the recurring payments exchanged between traders that keep perpetual futures tethered to spot prices, are starting to spike on some venues, running 9-10% annualized on Hyperliquid and OKX. The three-month annualized basis on Deribit held steady above 6%. Rising open interest alongside firmer funding points to leveraged longs being added.

Options flow stayed heavily call-skewed, with the 24-hour put/call ratio at 88% in favor of calls, up from 83%. The one-week 25-delta skew, a gauge of relative demand for upside calls versus downside puts, flattened further to about 1.5% from roughly 4%, and the at-the-money term structure remains in contango — a configuration in which longer-dated contracts carry richer pricing than near-term ones — with the front end at around 27-28% rising to roughly 40% by late 2027.

Coinglass data shows $344 million in 24-hour liquidations forced closures of leveraged positions triggered when price moves exhaust a trader's collateral — up from $100 million a day earlier, with a 28-72 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($132 million), ETH ($70 million) and other assets ($26 million) led notional liquidations. The Binance liquidation heatmap flags $87,400 as a core liquidation level to monitor in the event of a further price rise.

Token Movers

Quant (QNT) led the decliners after a wildly volatile week, giving back around 15% over 24 hours to trade near $250. The interoperability token had previously more than tripled in a multi-day surge, but profit-taking took hold alongside a broader cooling across recent outperformers.

LayerZero (ZRO, $1.9859) and Aave (AAVE, $177.75) were among the top large-cap gainers, jumping around 11% and 9%, respectively, over 24 hours. ZRO traded near $1.91 during the move, while AAVE reached $182 as buying momentum built around proposed protocol upgrades and fee-switch governance discussions, which center on whether to activate sharing of the protocol's fees with tokenholders.

Yesterday's top performers reversed course, as Ethena (ENA) and NEAR Protocol (NEAR, $4.9328) slipped about 9% and 8.6%, respectively, over 24 hours. ENA dropped to around $0.25 after earlier touching multi-week highs, while NEAR pulled back below $5.00.

Memecoins showed localized resilience, led by dogwifhat (WIF), which added 6.2% over 24 hours to trade near $0.26. Memecoin launchpad token pump.fun (PUMP, $0.006456) also saw renewed buying, ticking up nearly 4% as speculative capital rotated within the sector.

Stacks (STX, $0.3884) and Midnight (NIGHT, $0.04361) both paused their sharp multi-day rallies, slipping roughly 5% and 5.6%, respectively, over 24 hours. STX held around $0.38 following Wednesday's executive leadership announcement, while NIGHT pulled back to $0.04 after gaining more than 20% earlier in the week.

Source: CoinDesk — Crypto traders are in risk-on mode as bitcoin dominance nears return to 60%.