News

• Bitcoin fell below $63,000, marking a 1.4% drop in 24 hours, influenced by profit-taking after a recent rally.
• QCP Capital noted options-market activity that suggests a generally bullish mood, but not an explosive move higher in the short term.
• SafePal's SFPlus release boosted its SFP token value by up to 8% over the past week by adding rewards to encourage staking.

Bitcoin (BTC) slid under $63,000 early Tuesday as profit-taking after a weekend rally extended into a second day and weighed on the broader crypto market.

BTC fell 1.4% in 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows, with ether (ETH) , BNB Chain's BNB, Cardano's ADA and xrp (XRP) falling as much as 2%. Memecoin dogecoin (DOGE) led majors lower with a 4% slide, while Ton Network's TON – hit by the arrest of the CEO of closely related Telegram – fell 4% to bring seven-day losses to more than 20%.

The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20) , a liquid index of the largest tokens by market capitalization, fell 1.5%.

QCP Capital, Singapore-based trading desk, noted an increase in call spread buying while noting the selling of bitcoin calls at the $100,000 level. The strategy suggests a generally bullish mood, but not an explosive move higher in the short term.

A call option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to purchase an asset at a specific price, called the "strike" or "exercise" price, on or before a specific date, called the "expiration." Calls are implicitly bullish. A put option gives the buyer the right to sell an asset at the strike price on or before the expiration date. A bull call spread consists of one long call with a lower strike price and one short call with a higher strike price. Both calls have the same underlying asset, such as bitcoin, in this case.

"Even with higher spot, BTC and ETH vols are currently more skewed for puts than calls till Oct," QCP said in a Telegram broadcast. "This is surprising given the overwhelmingly bullish sentiment. It possibly indicates that the market was well positioned for this move and was quick to profit by selling calls."

SafePal's SFP gets staking boost

A new points feature for crypto wallet provider SafePal's SFP tokens has sent prices up as much as 8% in the past week, outperforming gains in bitcoin and other major tokens.

The so-called SFPlus update seeks "genuine" token holders who stake the tokens for a longer term instead of simply storing them as part of the wallet balance. Holders begin accumulating an online score that grows over time the longer the SFP is staked. The points can be redeemed for certain rewards.

"Stakers can access exclusive benefits like airdrop rewards, discounts on our hardware wallets, and upgraded account tiers in our CeDeFi banking gateway among other features, and partnerships we've developed as a wallet suite seamlessly through SFPlus hub" said CEO and co-founder Veronica Wong in an interview with CoinDesk.

"This aligns the interests of loyal $SFP holders closer with our wallet users, and is part of efforts in addressing an industry issue where the growth of a project doesn't necessarily translate to its token holders, especially in the long term," she said.

"It has only been a few days since the launch of SFPlus, but there is already close to 1.5 million $SFP staked from over 100,000 wallets, with continued steady growth despite the uncertain market conditions."