Bitcoin Fails at $81K as IBIT Put Concentration Builds; Solana ETF Hits $1B Milestone

Bitcoin traded at $78,385 near midday Friday, down 2.3% over 24 hours after a second failed attempt at $81,000, with IBIT options showing a heavy skew toward downside strikes even as the headline put/call volume ratio prints call-heavy at 0.43. The mixed positioning suggests hedging into the weekend rather than outright directional conviction, according to InflowScan data.

Market Pulse

Spot majors are broadly lower into the New York lunch hour. Bitcoin sits at $78,385, off 2.3% on the day with an intraday range of 2.1%. Ether trades at $2,471, down 1.5%. Solana and XRP lead losses at -3.4% and -3.3% respectively, with SOL's session range stretching to 3.9%. Funding is split: BTC and ETH perpetuals hold modestly positive at Binance (+6.5% and +6.2% annualized), while SOL and XRP funding turned negative at roughly -9% and -6.4% annualized on Binance — consistent with short-side pressure into the altcoin drawdown rather than long capitulation on the majors.

Options Positioning

The IBIT chain carries the day's most noteworthy tell. Headline put/call volume prints 0.43 and open-interest P/C sits at 0.713, but the top three put strikes by open interest — $20 (OI 166,389), $30 (50,951) and $35 (43,733) — dwarf the top call strikes at $40, $45 and $50. With IBIT trading at $45.50, that put stack represents deep out-of-the-money downside insurance rather than active directional bets. IV30 sits at 40.3%. FBTC mirrors the pattern with put OI concentrated at $40 versus a $69.56 underlying. On the ether side, ETHA shows a call-heavy 0.22 volume P/C with IV30 elevated at 54.7%, and open interest clustered symmetrically at the $15 and $16 strikes. XRPC stands out with an OI P/C of just 0.021 and top call strikes at $22 and $32 versus a $15.46 underlying — positioning consistent with tail-optionality rather than near-term conviction.

Narrative

Bitwise's Solana ETF crossed $1 billion in AUM, the first SOL product to do so, arriving on a day the underlying token is down 3.4%. The milestone lands alongside a Bitcoin.com report noting spot bitcoin ETFs collectively topped $100 billion in cumulative AUM after a $242 million inflow session. Meanwhile, traders parsing Fed Chair Warsh's remarks came away empty-handed on policy signal, per Decrypt — a headline that helps explain the failed $81,000 retest and the defensive put structure building on IBIT. A separate Street report flagged bitcoin's 90-day correlation with gold pushing above 50%, tying the tape to sovereign-debt anxiety rather than crypto-native flows.

Afternoon Watch

16:00 UTC funding print across BTC and ETH perpetuals — a flip negative on BTC would be the first since the $81K rejection sequence began.
Weekend gamma positioning on IBIT: the $20 put wall is far out of the money, but any shift in near-dated strikes ($40-$42) would be worth tracking as dealers hedge into the close.
USDC market cap slipped $194M over 24 hours to $73.7B, while USDT held roughly flat at $183.3B — a divergence historically associated with US-desk risk trimming.