Bitcoin starts the US week 6% under Friday’s close, with funding below zero and Nvidia and the Fed minutes ahead

Bitcoin traded at $64,502 on Coinbase at 17:38 UTC on Sunday 15 November, 6.3% below the $68,839 it fetched when Wall Street closed on Friday at 21:00 UTC. In between, the weekend took it down 10% to $61,946 at 01:45 UTC on Sunday. Ether did worse: $1,947 at Friday’s close, a low of $1,709 in the same minute, and $1,805 at 17:38 UTC. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index printed 10 for Sunday, against 20 on Friday.

For the US week that opens on Monday, what the drop left behind counts more than the low itself. On Binance, bitcoin perpetual pool de teneur de marché automatisé divergent, par rapport à une simple conservation des mêmes jetons. Elle devient définitive au retrait.">Il passe entre traders, pas à la plateforme.">funding went below zero for the first time this week only at the 16:00 UTC settlement on Sunday. Open interest in coins is about 7% under Friday’s level, yet about three Binance accounts in four are still long. On Deribit, puts cost far more than calls. Then come Nvidia’s results call on Tuesday, the minutes of the Fed’s October meeting on Wednesday, a Senate hearing for two SEC nominees on Thursday and a Deribit expiry on Friday.

How the night of the low unfolded, with about $2 billion of long positions liquidated, is in our Sunday morning report on bitcoin below $62,000. The week that led here, session by session and fund by fund, is in Saturday’s analysis of bitcoin’s 8.7% weekly loss. This piece starts at Friday’s close and looks forward.

Bitcoin price this week starts 6.3% under Friday’s close

The figures below come from Coinbase candles: the open of the 21:00 UTC hour on Friday, the highest and lowest prices after it, and the open of the 17:38 UTC minute on Sunday. Percentages compare each level with Friday’s US close.

The weekend’s best prices came within three hours of Friday’s close, so there was no Saturday rally to give back. Bitcoin slid through Saturday, broke down in the small hours of Sunday, when no US cash market was open, and by early evening had recovered 4.1% from the low. Ether bounced a little more, 5.6% from its low by 17:38 UTC, but it had more ground to recover. From the weekend high to the low, bitcoin lost 9.4%.

The rest of the market moved with it. At 17:18 UTC the total crypto market was worth $2.19 trillion, 4.41% less than 24 hours earlier, with bitcoin’s share at 59.4%. Over seven days, on the same snapshot, bitcoin was down 14.9%, ether 19.0%, solana 20.3% and XRP 17.6%.

Sentiment followed a straight line. The Fear and Greed Index published by alternative.me stood at 32 on Tuesday, then read 29, 28, 20 and 13 before reaching 10 on Sunday, deep inside the zone the index labels extreme fear. Cointelegraph, which reported the same readings on Sunday, called the drop the weakest bitcoin level since July on CoinGecko’s price basis.

One feature of past weekends no longer applies. CME Group’s bitcoin futures and options have traded around the clock since 29 May 2026, MarketsMedia reported, so the regulated contract priced the weekend’s moves as they happened rather than catching up on Sunday night.

The weekly candle closes at 00:00 UTC on Monday, a few hours after publication. CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole wrote on 13 November that the weekly MACD histogram, a momentum gauge, had turned negative and that a negative reading at the Sunday close would confirm the signal. With bitcoin more than 6% under Friday’s level on Sunday evening, that confirmation depends on the last few hours of trading.

Leverage after the flush: funding turned negative only at 16:00 UTC on Sunday

blockchain, où l'on échange des jetons directement depuis son propre wallet, sans confier la garde de ses fonds à une entreprise.">swap perpétuel) est un dérivé qui suit le cours d’un actif avec effet de levier, sans jamais expirer. Un paiement de financement entre longs et shorts, réglé toutes les quelques heures, garde le prix du contrat proche du cours comptant ou de l’indice.">Perpetual futures never expire. To keep them close to spot, exchanges charge a funding payment every eight hours: when the rate is positive, longs pay shorts, and when it is negative, shorts pay longs. On Binance’s BTCUSDT perpetual, the rate stayed positive at every settlement from Friday to Sunday morning, including the 00:00 UTC payment on Sunday, less than two hours before the low.

These are tiny rates. At -0.00025%, a $100,000 short position paid 25 cents to the long side at Sunday’s 16:00 UTC settlement. What the shift says is that nobody is paying up any more to hold leveraged longs. It does not describe a crowd of shorts large enough to be squeezed. On Sunday morning at 05:41 UTC, funding on Bybit and OKX was also close to zero.

Open interest: fewer dollars at risk, almost as many coins

Open interest, the value of futures contracts still open, tells a quieter story. On Binance’s BTCUSDT perpetual it stood at 94,117 BTC at 17:33 UTC on Sunday, about $6.1 billion at a mark near $64,700. The daily snapshots taken at 00:00 UTC show how little the coin count moved during the week.

Measured in bitcoin, open interest stayed between 94,000 and 101,000 all week. The latest reading is 7% under Friday’s stamp. In dollars the fall is larger, about $1.1 billion or nearly 16%, and most of that is the lower price rather than closed positions. Traders trimmed. They did not leave.

Retail accounts are still three to one long

The other Binance gauge points the same way. Its global long/short account ratio, which counts accounts rather than money, was 2.84 in the 17:00 UTC hour on Sunday, meaning 74.0% of accounts with an open bitcoin futures position were long. It peaked at 3.12, or 75.7%, in the hour of the low, and the daily reading for 14 November was 3.23, or 76.4%. A cascade of about $2 billion in liquidations shook out the most leveraged positions, but it did not change the direction most small traders are betting on. This is one exchange and one way of counting, so it describes a crowd, not the market.

Options: puts cost 11 to 12 volatility points more than calls

On Deribit, options positioning leans defensive. Coindaro computed the figures below from Deribit’s public data between 17:30 and 17:40 UTC on Sunday, with the bitcoin index at $64,497.42. Open interest is in bitcoin.

The 27 November monthly contract is the one to watch. It holds 98,556 BTC of calls and puts, about $6.4 billion at the index, the biggest expiry before December. Its put/call ratio was 0.85 in Coindaro’s reading on 14 November and 0.94 on Sunday evening, by the same method: holders added puts relative to calls through the drop.

Max pain is the price at which the options of an expiry would expire with the least value for their buyers. For the two November Friday contracts it sits $7,500 to $10,500 above the current price. It shows where option writers would pay out least, not where bitcoin is headed, and it often stays far from spot.

The price of protection says more. In Coindaro’s calculation of 25-delta skew, comparing the implied volatility of the put and the call whose deltas are closest to 0.25, the 20 November $62,000 put traded at 61.0% against 48.7% for the $67,000 call, a gap of 12.3 volatility points. For 27 November, the $61,000 put stood at 52.6% and the $68,000 call at 41.4%, a gap of 11.2 points. At-the-money implied volatility was 54.0% for the weekly and 46.2% for the monthly. CoinDesk reported a one-week skew of about 14% on 14 November from a different method, so the two readings are not directly comparable, but both say the same thing: buyers pay a premium for downside cover.

Dealers sit on the other side of much of that demand. On Saturday at 12:37 UTC, with bitcoin near $67,191, Greeks.Live data reported by CoinDesk showed market makers in negative gamma across roughly $58,000 to $72,000, with the largest concentrations near $68,000 and $70,000 and a “gamma flip” above about $73,000. “Both Bitcoin and Ether have slipped into deep negative gamma territory,” said Adam, a macro researcher at Greeks.Live.

A dealer short gamma hedges by selling as prices fall and buying as they rise, which stretches moves in both directions. Until the flip levels are reclaimed, CoinDesk’s report said, traders should expect “fragile order books, exaggerated intraday wicks, and momentum-driven price action.” That snapshot was taken before Sunday’s drop; the 01:45 UTC wick to $61,946 matched it.

Spot bitcoin ETFs lost $1.07 billion last week, and Monday brings the next print

US spot bitcoin ETFs did not trade over the weekend, so their latest figures still end on Friday 13 November. According to Farside data, the funds lost $1,065.3 million that week, with outflows on all five days: $201.0 million, $95.0 million, $299.8 million, $284.1 million and $185.4 million. The week before, they had lost $1,281.7 million. Cointelegraph, on Sunday morning, put the two-week total at $2.35 billion.

The streak is long. The bitcoin funds as a group have recorded seven straight outflow days since 5 November, about $1.9 billion in all, and BlackRock’s IBIT, the largest, has had 11 sessions of outflows running. Ether ETFs lost $398.9 million last week and solana funds $32.0 million, also per Farside.

Monday’s numbers will be the first to include the weekend’s damage. ETF buyers in the US could not act on Saturday or Sunday; the drop lands on the funds’ net asset values when the cash session opens at 14:30 UTC, and the day’s flows appear after the 21:00 UTC close. A single inflow day at IBIT would end its run at 11 sessions. Monday’s flows will reflect a session that comes before Nvidia and the Fed minutes, not after.

Stablecoins held steady through the crash but are $15.9 billion lighter than a month ago

Coindaro’s sum of dollar-pegged stablecoins on DefiLlama came to $287.79 billion at about 17:30 UTC on Sunday. A day earlier it was $287.66 billion, a week earlier $292.12 billion and a month earlier $303.65 billion. Supply therefore rose $0.13 billion in 24 hours, fell $4.33 billion (1.5%) in a week and dropped $15.86 billion (5.2%) in a month.

The weekend did not drain stablecoins: the selling was in bitcoin and ether, and the dollars stayed on chain. The month is another matter. USDT is down $8.2 billion since mid-October and USDC $3.6 billion. Coinbase Institutional, quoted by Cryptoast on 13 November, counted an $11.5 billion fall in USDT, USDC and DAI over 30 days, a narrower basket with the same direction. Fresh stablecoin supply is often read as buying power waiting to enter crypto, and that pool has been shrinking for weeks.

For euro holders, down 6.1% since Friday afternoon

On Coinbase’s euro book, bitcoin was €58,643 at 17:38 UTC on Sunday, against €59,553 at 17:30 UTC on Saturday and €62,428 at 17:37 UTC on Friday, a 6.1% loss across the two days. The reference time is Friday afternoon rather than the US close, so the figure is not directly comparable with the dollar ledger above.

The Fed backdrop: a December hike priced near 90% on 13 November

The question for the Fed’s 8-9 December meeting is how much it raises rates, not whether it does. On Friday 13 November, CME FedWatch put the chance of a quarter-point hike to 4.00-4.25% at 89.7% and of a half-point hike at 10.3%, InvestmentNews reported. Rate futures have not traded on a weekday since, so Monday will bring the next reading. The target range today is 3.75% to 4.00%, after a hike in September and a hold on 28 October, decided by a 10-2 vote.

Fed officials have said as much in public. Governor Christopher Waller, in a speech on 10 November: “I would still support a 25 basis point increase in the FOMC’s policy rate at our December meeting.” New York Fed President John Williams said on 13 November, as quoted by FXStreet, that the Fed “still has work to do to get monetary policy to the right place”.

Stocks have taken that in stride while crypto has not. On Friday 13 November the S&P 500 closed at 7,561.67, up 2.50% on the week, the Nasdaq at 25,136.27 and the VIX at 19.30. The 10-year Treasury yield was 5.15%. Gold ended at $3,886, down 4.6%, and Nvidia at $162.85, down 12.75% in a week that included its chief executive’s departure on 12 November.

The US week ahead for crypto, day by day

The calendar below draws on Newsquawk’s week-in-focus note of 13 November, FXStreet and XM previews from the same day, company releases, the Fed’s own calendar and, for the Senate hearing, TokenPost and Bloomingbit. Hours are shown where the organiser has published one. US clocks are on standard time, so the cash session runs from 14:30 to 21:00 UTC.

Nvidia is the event with a confirmed hour. The company’s announcement sets its call for 2 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday 17 November, 22:00 UTC, after the US close. It reports after a week in which its shares fell 12.75% and its chief executive stepped down. XM’s Raffi Boyadjian wrote on 13 November that disappointing guidance could set off a new sell-off in AI stocks and force liquidations in assets such as gold and bitcoin. That is his scenario, not a forecast, and it runs both ways: a strong guide would test whether bitcoin can follow a risk rally it sat out in the week to 13 November.

Wednesday brings the Fed minutes. Under the rule printed on the Fed’s calendar, minutes come out three weeks after the policy decision, which points to 18 November; Newsquawk, FXStreet and XM all date them to that Wednesday. The meeting took place before the October consumer price figures came out on 10 November, so the minutes describe a Fed that had not yet seen that inflation reading. Boyadjian expects them to show no discussion of a double hike; signs of growing urgency, he wrote, would lift the odds of half a point.

Thursday belongs to Washington. The Senate hears Steven Levine, nominated to the SEC seat of Hester Peirce, and Kristin Johnson, details in our report on the 19 November hearing. Friday brings the weekly Deribit expiry at 08:00 UTC, with 19,044 BTC of calls and 12,395 BTC of puts open, and the scheduled release of 31 million ZRO tokens by LayerZero. ZRO was down about 11.5% in 24 hours in Sunday’s 17:18 UTC market snapshot.

Beyond Friday, Thanksgiving closes US cash markets on Thursday 26 November, the 27 November Deribit monthly expiry carries 98,556 BTC of open options, and on 30 November MSCI removes Strategy from its indexes at the close.

What would change the picture

These are conditions, not forecasts: what would prove the weekend’s reading wrong, in either direction, and the levels analysts have named.

A guide-up from Nvidia on Tuesday evening would be the first test of whether risk appetite can carry bitcoin, after a week in which the S&P 500 rose and bitcoin fell. A miss is the scenario XM describes, with selling that spills into crypto.

Wednesday’s Fed minutes matter mostly at the margin. Hawkish detail would add to a hike already priced at close to 90%, so the surprise would have to come from talk of half a point. Anything that reads as patience would cut against that pricing.

Monday’s ETF print is the cleanest flow signal of the week. A first IBIT inflow since late October would end an 11-session streak; another round of outflows across the group would extend seven days and $1.9 billion of selling.

In options, dealers short gamma until about $73,000 mean that moves between here and there can run faster than usual in both directions. The 20 November and 27 November expiries, with max pain at $72,000 and $75,000 in Coindaro’s calculation, mark the dates when part of that hedging rolls off.

In futures, funding at or just below zero and smaller dollar open interest leave less fuel for another long cascade. Against that, three Binance accounts in four are still long, which keeps the market exposed to another drop in thin weekend or overnight trading.

The weekend low fell inside the Glassnode cluster, and by Sunday evening bitcoin was back above the $62,000-$63,000 zone Zhang had named on 13 November. “We’re watching the fourth capitulation event since the all-time high,” analyst James Check wrote early on Saturday 14 November, as reported by CoinDesk. In his view the area is a deep value zone, which he said does not mean the bottom is in.

What is still open on Sunday evening

Three numbers will reset the picture before Wall Street opens. The weekly candle closes at 00:00 UTC Monday, settling the momentum signal. Binance’s next funding settlement is at the same time, with a live estimate of -0.0015% at 17:46 UTC. The FedWatch odds quoted above date from Friday 13 November and will move with Monday’s trading in rate futures.

The first hard data point of the week for crypto comes after 21:00 UTC on Monday, with the ETF flows.