Bitcoin traders add about $800 million of new futures positions before US payrolls

Open interest is counted in dollars, so part of any rise is just the price moving. Had the number of bitcoin contracts stayed flat, yesterday's $20.9 billion would have grown with the 3.4% rally to about $21.6 billion ^[1][2]. The reported figure was $22.4 billion ^[8]. That leaves roughly $0.8 billion of positions that did not exist a day earlier ^[3]. CoinDesk says rising open interest alongside firmer funding points to leveraged longs being added ^[10]. The options tape leans the same way, with the 24-hour put/call ratio at 88% in favour of calls, up from 83% ^[18].

The cash half of the risk-on reading is weaker. CoinDesk takes USDT's slide to about 6.3% of the market as a sign that traders are moving out of cash and into tokens ^[5]. A share falls when the total it is measured against rises. If the whole market had gained the same 3.4% as bitcoin and not one USDT had been redeemed, a share of about 6.5% would have slipped to 6.3% on price alone ^[5]. The report does not give USDT's outstanding supply.

The concentration part holds up better. Ether, XRP, solana and BNB all rose without keeping pace with bitcoin ^[6], while SKY, AAVE and APT gained 7% to 10% to lead the 100 largest coins ^[7].

Friday's test is a payrolls number economists expect at 90,000, down from 162,000 in August, with unemployment forecast to hold at 4.1% according to FactSet ^[2]. CoinDesk reported that hike odds may not move much unless payrolls come in well above forecasts ^[14]. A big beat is the case that matters for the new longs, since a stronger report could lift Treasury yields and revive hike bets ^[3]. "I am watching Friday's payrolls and the 14 October 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 ^[15][16]. His $82,000 and his $90,000 each sit about 4.7% from $86,000, and $80,000 is 7% below it ^[8].

Payrolls may also turn out to be the smaller of Carding's two dates. The Oct 14 CPI is on his list for the same reason, its effect on real yields ^[15][17].

I think the leverage half of the reading is sound and the cash half is unproven. The new positions and the funding premium are measured ^[3][9], while the stablecoin share is a ratio that a rally moves by itself ^[5]. The exposure view is wrong if a hot print arrives and shorts still make up most of the liquidations that follow ^[11].