Bitcoin and Ethereum Stall as Traders Brace for Holiday Volatility

Bitcoin and Ethereum are mostly flat ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are down nearly 1% over 24 hours, while XRP is down 3.1%, undoing Monday’s ETF-driven gains, according to CoinGecko data. The performance of Solana, BNB, Dogecoin, and other top altcoins hovers between -1% and 1%.

While the broader traditional finance sector remains closed on Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday, crypto markets will remain open. However, due to the holiday, liquidity and volume are often drained from the market, which could trigger volatile moves.

“I wouldn’t read today’s market action as Thanksgiving-driven,” Markus Levin, co-founder of DePIN blockchain XYO, told Decrypt, noting that the markets being down or flat today is coincidental, and has nothing to do with the holiday itself.

The crypto market outlook, which had been largely bearish until last week, flipped bullish over the weekend after the odds of a December rate cut rose from 30% to 80%, according to the FedWatch tool.

Investors are now overwhelmingly expecting a quarter-point rate cut on December 10, which would bring the target rate down to 3.50%-3.75%.

The sharp repricing of Federal Reserve policy undid several bearish signals and catalyzed a risk-on sentiment. That is reflected in prediction market Myriad, where users assigned a 65% chance of Bitcoin hitting $100,000 before $69,000.

What’s next for Bitcoin and Ethereum?

While the market outlook remains skewed to the bullish side due to rate-cut expectations, it isn’t set in stone.

Block options traded this week showed $2 billion in long call condors from institutional or high-net-worth investors, according to a previous Decrypt report. This flow suggests sophisticated buyers expect Bitcoin to remain rangebound between $100,000 and $118,000.

Analysts have said traders are likely to deploy a long call condor strategy. It's an options strategy that involves buying four call options with different strike prices with the same expiry. It is employed when the underlying asset is expected to be range-bound.

Additionally, options market data shows negative skew and high short-dated implied volatility, suggesting that bearish bets remain elevated amid higher uncertainty or risk.