Gate Research Institute: Market Under Pressure and Consolidation | BTC Upward Momentum Restricted by Options Structure

Cryptocurrency Market Overview

• BTC (-2.01% | Current price 88,558.7 USDT): In the past 24 hours, BTC retreated from above $90,000, touching a low of $87,581, and generally maintained a low-range oscillation after a weak downward trend. The moving averages show a bearish alignment with MA5 < MA10 < MA30, and the price has been consistently below MA30, indicating a short- to medium-term bearish trend. During the decline, trading volume did not significantly increase, suggesting sustained selling pressure rather than panic selling, with limited bullish support. Short-term support levels are in the $87,500–$88,000 range; if this is effectively broken, further decline to $86,500–$86,000 may occur. Medium-term, a trend reversal signal will become clearer only after MA10 turns upward or the daily chart recovers above $90,000.
• ETH (-1.53% | Current price 3,079 USDT): ETH’s movement is highly synchronized with BTC, currently in a consolidation phase after a oscillation downward. Since December 13, the price has remained below MA30, with MA5 and MA10 repeatedly forming death crosses, indicating a weak medium-term trend and limited short-term rebound momentum. The $3,100–$3,120 range repeatedly faces resistance, forming a clear short-term pressure zone. Trading volume has not shown extreme expansion, suggesting the decline is driven more by capital outflows and waning momentum rather than panic selling. Short-term support is at the $3,000 mark, and ETH’s rebound potential will depend on BTC stabilizing and recovering.
• Altcoins: The fear index remains at 16, indicating the market is in extreme fear, with sentiment cooling and funds temporarily flowing into stablecoins and defensive assets.
• Macro: As of December 12, the S&P 500 index fell 1.07% to 6,827.41 points; the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 0.51% to 48,458.05 points; the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.69% to 23,195.17 points. As of 11:15 AM ( UTC+8 on December 15, spot gold is priced at $4,327.5 per ounce, up 0.58% within 24 hours.

Hot Tokens in the Market

FHE Mind Network (+95.2%, circulating market cap $19.83 million)

According to Gate data, the FHE token is currently priced at $0.07969, up over 90% in 24 hours. Mind Network (FHE) is a decentralized privacy-preserving infrastructure project based on fully homomorphic encryption technology, aiming to promote a fully encrypted internet through secure encrypted data and AI computation.

FHE has been active recently, with this surge driven by technological collaborations, ecological incentives, and narrative resonance, providing strong psychological support to the community. First, Mind Network partnered with Chainlink to launch an innovative FHE privacy bridge, utilizing Chainlink CCIP combined with ZK and FHE technologies to enable encrypted cross-chain messaging. Second, Mind Network announced holding 1% Pippin tokens as a long-term strategic reserve and launched an FHE lock-up airdrop incentive plan. Meanwhile, the project is also promoting encrypted AI infrastructure, further fueling FOMO sentiment.

ICE Ice Open Network (+46.08%, circulating market cap $17.34 million)

According to Gate data, the ICE token is currently priced at $0.002495, up over 46% in 24 hours. Ice Open Network (ICE/ION) is a Layer-1 blockchain platform aiming to reshape Web3 user and developer interactions through decentralized services. It focuses on user data sovereignty, privacy protection, and global digital connectivity, offering core functions such as digital identity verification, social media interaction, content distribution, and secure data storage. Highlights include an intuitive drag-and-drop dApp generator that allows even non-technical users to easily build dApps.

The main driver of ICE’s rise appears to be speculative hype triggered by the migration of ICE <-> ION tokens. Users need to migrate via the Online+ app to ION tokens (the new mainnet tokens). Although this event poses short-term liquidity risks, it also stimulates FOMO, with many traders buying ICE in advance to complete migration or capture arbitrage opportunities. Additionally, the migration marks the official transition to the ION mainnet, emphasizing zero-code dApps and privacy transactions, which enhances long-term narrative appeal.

BAS BNB Attestation Service (+48.02%, circulating market cap $23.82 million)

According to Gate data, BAS is currently priced at $0.0092, up over 48% in 24 hours. BNB Attestation Service (BAS) is a native verification and reputation infrastructure layer within the BSC ecosystem, focusing on building composable on-chain KYC (identity verification), asset proof, and reputation record systems. It integrates on-chain behavior, social data, and community contributions, providing privacy-preserving zero-knowledge verification solutions suitable for RWA, DeFi, AI agents, and other scenarios.

The recent rise in BAS is driven by technical upgrades. Between December 12-14, the BAS team launched the ERC-8004 V1 protocol upgrade, introducing an AI Agent-specific reputation tracking mechanism to enhance the intelligence of on-chain identity verification and increasing demand for BAS tokens to pay for verification fees.

Alpha Insights

BTC’s long-term difficulty in rising is due to large sell pressure in the options market structure

Bitwise advisor Jeff Park believes that BTC’s current inability to break through significantly is not due to lack of demand but is caused by market supply (especially large holders’ behavior) suppressing the rise. Particularly in the options market, a large amount of activity creates a “net sell Delta structure,” which restrains BTC’s upward momentum.

The above chart compares two different market “volatility skews”: IBIT (BTC ETF options), which shows that long-term implied volatility of call options is higher than at-the-money (ATM) → indicating market expectation of future bullishness and willingness to pay higher for “upside insurance”; native BTC options (such as on Deribit): implied volatility of calls is lower than ATM → indicating the market’s reluctance to pay premiums for large upward moves. This difference suggests that two types of participants behave differently: ETF markets tend to buy calls, while native BTC markets tend to sell calls, especially OG holders who profit from selling call options. This structural divergence results in a lack of strong upward price momentum.

Overall, OG holders and their hedging behaviors are suppressing Bitcoin’s upward drive, leading to inflows (like ETFs) but still lacking enough momentum for explosive gains. If OG entities do not change their volatility selling behavior, Bitcoin may continue to oscillate without significant explosive upward movement; only new “buying forces” (such as increased bullish demand or reduced options selling pressure) can alter this structure.

Ant International is building an enterprise treasury management platform leveraging blockchain, AI, and tokenization technologies

Ant International’s treasury platform is a “three-in-one” “treasury stack,” including Whale + Bettr + AI (Falcon TST). Whale is a permissioned chain involving multiple banks, supporting bank-issued tokenized deposits, with key features like 24/7 real-time intra-group liquidity transfers, programmable rules (smart contracts) for automatic reconciliation, multi-currency settlement, without traditional banking cut-off times; Bettr is a client-facing commercial brand providing real-time treasury management, settlement tokens (a wholesale tokenized electronic currency licensed under MiCA in the EU), embedded financial services, mainly targeting airlines, e-commerce, cross-border trade, helping companies reduce costs and improve efficiency; Falcon TST is a time-series transformer model with nearly 2-2.5 billion parameters, trained on historical data, with FX and cash flow prediction accuracy over 90%, reducing liquidity and FX-related costs.

In summary, behind this innovative trend are several major industry directions: Stablecoins and tokenized deposits becoming foundational infrastructure for institutional fund settlement, not limited to crypto markets; AI financial forecasting models beginning to replace traditional budgeting and hedging processes; blockchain evolving from simple payment chains to core networks for fund clearing and settlement.

Stable Mainnet launch below expectations, on-chain activity relatively subdued

Supported by Tether’s sister company Bitfinex, the stablecoin public chain Stable launched for a week with fewer than 25,000 total addresses on-chain, far below market expectations. Meanwhile, the total number of tokens on Stable is only 339, with transaction fees in the last 24 hours less than 0.5 gUSDT. Stable has not exhibited the typical rapid address expansion, interaction spike, or application-driven activity seen in new mainnet launches. Logically, the core issue facing Stable is not insufficient brand backing but that its differentiated narrative has yet to translate into perceptible on-chain demand. In the context of mature high-frequency settlement networks like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron, relying solely on a friendly stablecoin chain or Tether-related narrative is insufficient to drive large-scale migration by users and developers.

Furthermore, without clear native applications, payment/settlement advantages, or significant improvements in costs and efficiency, Stable is more likely to be viewed as a supplementary option to existing stablecoin infrastructure rather than an indispensable new mainnet. This partly explains the low on-chain activity in the early stage of mainnet launch. Future performance will depend on whether it can convert application deployment, funding incentives, or institutional collaborations into sustained on-chain usage, rather than remaining at the conceptual narrative level.
References:

• Gate, https://www.gate.com/trade/BTC_USDT
• Farside Investors, https://farside.co.uk/btc/
• Gate, https://www.gate.com/trade/ETH_USDT
• Farside Investors, https://farside.co.uk/eth/
• Gate, https://www.gate.com/crypto-market-data
• CoinGecko, https://www.coingecko.com/en/cryptocurrency-heatmap
• Jeff’s Substack, https://dgt10011.substack.com/p/the-one-chart-that-explains-why-bitcoin?r=4e7rq6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
• Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zennonkapron/2025/12/13/inside-ant-internationals-treasury-platform-how-whale-bettr-and-ai-are-rewiring-global-liquidity/

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