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Bitcoin clings to $75,000 support as bear market signals resurface
Bitcoin hovered below Tom Lee’s $76,000 bull-market threshold while hyperliquid and monero bucked broader crypto weakness.
May 27, 2026, 10:54 a.m. 3 min read
What to know:
- Bitcoin is trading above the $75,000 support level after being rejected at $78,000 on Tuesday, while remaining below the $76,000 threshold that analyst Tom Lee says must hold by month-end to confirm a new bull market.
- AI-linked tokens, including RENDER, FET and NEAR, gave back much of Tuesday’s rally, falling as much as 3% since midnight UTC and dragging the CoinDesk Computing Select Index down 2.2% and the DeFi Select Index 1.5%.
- Hyperliquid’s HYPE token bucked the trend with a 5.5% surge after hitting a record high earlier this week. Monero climbed 5% to retest the $400 level — bright spots in an otherwise cautious altcoin market.
AI tokens RENDER, FET and NEAR gave back much of their gains from Tuesday’s rally, falling between 1% and 3% since midnight UTC.
The U.S. stock market continued to diverge from crypto on Wednesday, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 index futures both hitting record highs after adding about 0.3%.
Crucially, bitcoin is now below Bitmine (BMNR) Chairman Tom Lee’s line in the sand at $76,000, which, he said, would signal the end of a bear market if BTC were to end the month above that level.
Derivatives positioning
- Crypto futures volume jumped 54% to $201 billion in 24 hours, while liquidations surged 87%. The massive percentage gains largely reflect the market waking up after an extended U.S. holiday lull rather than a structural shift in activity levels.
- Bitcoin dropped 1% over the last 24 hours as open interest climbed to 740K BTC from 704K BTC, a combination that typically confirms a price downtrend. The negative 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) shows traders are aggressively shorting via market orders while funding rates remain neutral.
- Ether’s open interest hit a record high 15.57 million ETH alongside negative CVD. It may be that traders are shorting contracts in anticipation of deeper price loss. This follows a technical breakdown of the bullish trendline that has supported the market since February, opening the door for deeper losses.
- Open interest in ZEC futures dropped for a third day to 2.30 million tokens as the price slid toward $564. The simultaneous drop in both price and open interest suggests that earlier bullish bets are being closed out rather than new short positions being opened.
- Bitcoin’s 30-day implied volatility index (BVIV) rose nearly 3% to 37.35%, marking its first gain in 10 days and a bounce from yearly lows. A continued rise would signal that the market is finally paying up for protection against a potential price swoon.
- Deribit data shows the $55,000 September put is the most traded contract of the past 24 hours. It represents a bet that bitcoin will fall significantly by the end of that month. Most activity has been clustered around downside protection at various strikes between $70,000 and $76,000.
