Bitcoin’s options market is telling a quieter, more cautious story than the price tape suggests. The most popular call option — previously at $80,000 for the past six months — has shifted down to $70,000. The ceiling has moved lower. Meanwhile ether is the week’s clear winner, up 11% on seven-day returns while bitcoin has gained 4% and SOL, TRON and HYPE are all in the red. The ETF data explains it: ether funds pulled in $96 million over three days, almost entirely from BlackRock’s low-fee ETHA. And in the most consequential standards announcement since TCP/IP: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Amazon and Coinbase have joined the x402 Foundation — an open-source project to give AI agents the ability to pay each other without subscriptions or credit cards, settling in stablecoins over HTTP. The internet’s payment layer is being redesigned in public.
CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets.
L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal.
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The most popular bitcoin call option has slipped by $10,000.
Bitcoin’s options market has undergone a notable positioning shift that could slow the largest cryptocurrency’s climb above $70,000. For the past six months, the most popular call option on Deribit was the $80,000 strike, carrying similar levels of open interest and defining bitcoin’s implied upside target in analyst commentary and options desks worldwide. That has now changed: the $70,000 call has taken the top spot, with notional open interest exceeding $1.63 billion. The $80,000 call is second, followed by the $72,000 call. In plain terms, the market’s implied ceiling has moved $10,000 lower. The implication is structural, not just semantic. Options Insights founder Imran Lakha explains that dealers currently hold a net long gamma exposure above $70,000. To stay market-neutral — the core discipline of a dealer running a hedged book — they must sell into price strength above that level. That mechanical selling acts as a brake, capping the speed and extent of any BTC rally past $70,000. Lakha notes ether does not face this dynamic and can “rip much faster” above key levels. Bitcoin traded near $64,100 Thursday, down about 1% since midnight UTC. A 2017-era wallet holding 5,908 BTC moved $383 million overnight, an unusual on-chain event worth monitoring for exchange-deposit follow-through. The U.S. intensified strikes into northern Iran and fired on a ship trying to run the blockade; Iran retaliated. U.S. 10-year Treasury yields rose to 4.573%. FxPro’s Kuptsikevich sums up the tactical case: buying quietly at less than half of peak levels looks like a reasonable tactic for the coming days or weeks.
AI payments have a new open standards body. Its aim is to reinvent the internet.
The x402 Foundation — a Linux Foundation-affiliated standards body convened to create an open payment layer for AI agents — has formalized its membership with a roster that reads like a cross-section of the entire financial internet. Premier members include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation. The protocol, named for the “402 payment required” HTTP response code that the early web’s architects intended for browser payments but left dormant for decades, aims to let AI agents pay each other — and pay for content, compute and services — via standard HTTP without subscriptions, credit card entry or human sign-off. Settling in stablecoins, it treats payments as a native function of the internet’s core protocol rather than an application layer bolted on top. The founding insight, articulated by AWS’s board chair Alin Dragos, is that the internet solved information exchange but not value exchange: “In order to build a standard, you need many competitors and payment methods to come and work together, and it’s important to have this neutral ground.” Denelle Dixon of the Stellar Development Foundation, a key member, draws a direct parallel to the early web’s failure to prevent walled gardens: “You don’t want to be in a walled garden when you’re dealing with money.” The foundation is searching for an executive director and has established a technical steering committee. AI agents do not respond to advertising — the business model that shapes today’s web — meaning that the shift to agentic commerce creates genuine structural demand for micropayment infrastructure that x402 is designed to supply.
Ether outruns bitcoin as ETF money returns — almost all of it from BlackRock’s fund.
Ether is the only large-cap crypto doing much of anything this week. It traded near $1,920 on Thursday, up 2.2% on the day and roughly 11% over seven sessions, carrying a market cap of around $231 billion on about $12 billion in daily volume. Bitcoin sat at $64,600, up 4.2% on the week but down 0.3% on the day. Below them the tape turns negative: Solana fell 1.1% to $77, TRON slipped 1.6% on the week, Hyperliquid’s HYPE lost 1.8%. This is not a broad market rally; it is a targeted ether bid driven by two specific factors. First, ETF flows: U.S. spot ether ETFs took in $96 million over the first three days of this week, already more than the $84 million gathered across all of last week. Of Wednesday’s $53.8 million, BlackRock’s ETHA absorbed $45.3 million and its smaller ETHB took $4 million — the other eight products split less than $5 million. Grayscale’s original ether trust, charging 2.5% versus BlackRock’s 0.25%, has now bled $5.3 billion since launch. Bitcoin ETFs remain erratic: they shed $424 million on July 13, took back $181 million the next day — money bouncing in and out within 48 hours is not the behavior of an allocator building a position. Second, Robinhood Chain: the L2 launched July 1, uses ether for gas and settles to Ethereum, and has been clearing more than $800 million in daily DEX volume, mostly memecoin trading, creating structural ETH demand that did not exist three weeks ago. Bitcoin’s on-chain data remains steady: Nansen shows exchange outflows holding through Middle East escalation with no rotation into stablecoins — the move that typically marks wallets stepping back — and funding rates are near zero, suggesting the leveraged longs that fuelled June’s liquidation cascades have been cleared. Bitcoin dominance sits at 58.3%.
CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets.
L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal.
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