Bitcoin is stuck at $73k while crude and tungsten steal the spotlight
Three months ago Bitcoin kissed $126k. This Monday at noon in Singapore it traded at $73.6k, up 3.6% before the move fizzled—another tease inside a $15k cage that has held since January.
The math is brutal: 40% shaved off the October peak, leveraged bets worth $19bn vaporised in a single October session, and every relief rally retracing within days. Crypto’s headline outperformance against equities since the Iran strike is, in trader speak, a dead-cat bounce off a lower basement.
Funding tells the story short sellers love
Negative funding rates on perpetual swaps mean bears are paying longs to stay short—an unmistakable stench of scepticism. “Open interest ticks up, funding flips negative, then we spike and give it all back,” says Jasper De Maere of Wintermute. Volume is thinner than in the 2025 consolidation band, so the same size order book hole now swallows price twice as fast.
Andreja Cobeljic at AMINA Bank sketches the textbook sequence: cliff-drop, 20% dead-cat, horizontal grind. “We’re missing the macro spark to break the loop,” she warns. Translation: no central-bank put, no dovish surprise, no retail FOMO—just algorithmic ping-pong.
Commodity fever pushes crypto to the kids’ table
While Bitcoin doodles rectangles, the grown-up assets are on a tear. Crude soared 70% to $120 then levelled near $100 after tanker insurance in the Strait of Hormuz priced in a war premium. Tungsten—yes, the heavy metal that tips armour-piercing shells—has leapt 557%, leaving copper and gold eating dust. Even aluminum is flirting with record highs.
Jeff Currie, the former Goldman head of commodities now steering Carlyle Energy Pathways, calls it “old-economy revenge, part two.” His playbook: own HALO—Heavy, Low-Obsolescence assets. “I want barrels, ingots, bauxite. Scarcity I can drop on my foot,” he told Bloomberg TV. The quip is already pinned on every energy trader’s screen.
Hyperliquid’s 24-hour leaderboard shows oil tokens outpacing BTC perpetuals in notional volume for the first time since the platform launched. Even within crypto, synthetic crude is cannibalising the flow that once chased dog-coin memes.
Etf inflows mask a deeper rot
Glass-eye data reveal a comforting headline: spot ETFs absorbed $2bn across three straight weeks of net inflows. Yet the coins they buy sit cold in custodian vaults, untouched by leverage or commerce—more like digital gold burial than circulation. Karl Naim at XBTO argues this proves Bitcoin has matured into a macro hedge. Maybe. But hedges that cannot hold a bid above $75k while missiles fly look suspiciously like stranded assets.
Spain’s 19% surge in pre-war gas stockpiles and whispers of Warsaw-style gold sales to fund defence budgets show where sovereign attention lies. Central banks are buyers of last resort for bullion, not blockchain.
The next catalyst map includes three horsemen: a credit crunch in private-debt markets, sticky inflation that ties the Fed’s hands, and supply chains that cannot reroute around Hormuz for months. Cobeljic’s base case: a short-lived pop to $78k–$80k, then another sweep of the range lows. After that, capital keeps marching into warehouses, tank farms and vaults where atoms, not hashes, back the trade.
Until the funding flips sustainably positive and barrels cool off, Bitcoin remains a spectator sport—watching the tangible world burn while it searches for a spark of its own.