Crypto traders are in risk-on mode as bitcoin dominance nears return to 60%

By CoinDesk10:32 (UTC), 2 October 2026 Updated

Crypto is a sea of green ahead of Friday's U.S. jobs report.

Bitcoin traded above $86,000 at 9:10 UTC, up 3.4% over 24 hours. Ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL) and BNB also rose, though none kept pace with bitcoin.

The bigger moves came further down the list. SKY, AAVE and APT jumped 7% to 10%, making them the best performers among the 100 largest coins by market value.

Bitcoin's dominance, or its share of the total crypto market, is closing in on 60%. Meanwhile, the share held by USDT, the largest dollar-pegged stablecoin, slipped to around 6.3%, suggesting traders are moving out of cash and into tokens. These two gauges point to a market growing more comfortable with risk.

The nonfarm payrolls report, due at 8:30 a.m. ET, is expected to show the U.S. economy added 90,000 jobs in September, down from 162,000 in August. The unemployment rate is forecast to hold at 4.1%, according to FactSet's consensus estimates.

The bigger question for bitcoin is how Treasury yields react, especially inflation-adjusted, or real, yields. Analysts are watching the jobs data and the Oct. 14 consumer price index report for that reason.

"I am watching Friday's payrolls and the 14 October CPI mainly for their effect on longer-dated yields. I use a 10-year real yield of about 3% as a monitoring level, and a sustained move above it would make a retest of $80,000 to $82,000 more likely than a run at $90,000," said Oliver Carding, head of marketing at Tesseract Group, which manages $500 million in assets.

Markets now see a 30% chance of a rate hike in October, down from 70%, after dovish remarks from New York Fed President John Williams and Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson. Lower odds of a hike tend to support risk assets like bitcoin.

Those odds may not move much unless payrolls come in well above forecasts, according to some observers. A big upside surprise could revive hike bets and potentially put pressure on bitcoin.

Derivatives positioning

BTC open interest picked up to $22.4B (from $20.9B yesterday), and funding rates are starting to spike on some venues - running 9-10% annualized on Hyperliquid and OKX. The 3-month annualized basis on Deribit held steady above 6%. The rising OI alongside firmer funding points to leveraged longs being added.
Options flow stayed heavily call-skewed, the 24-hour put/call ratio at 88% in favour of calls (from 83%). The 1-week 25-delta skew flattened further to ~1.5% (from ~4%), and the ATM term structure remains in contango - front end ~27–28% rising to ~40% by late 2027.
Coinglass data shows $344M in 24 hour liquidations (up from $100M yesterday), with a 28-72 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($132M), ETH ($70M) and Others ($26M) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations. Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $87,400 as a core liquidation level to monitor, in case of a price rise.

Token talk

Quant (QNT) led the decliners after a wildly volatile week, giving back around 15% over 24 hours to trade near $250. The interoperability token had previously more than tripled in a multi-day surge, but profit-taking took hold alongside a broader cooling across recent outperformers.
LayerZero (ZRO) and Aave (AAVE) were among the top large-cap gainers, jumping around 11% and 9%, respectively, over 24 hours. ZRO traded near $1.91, while AAVE reached $182 as buying momentum built around proposed protocol upgrades and fee-switch governance discussions.
Yesterday's top performers reversed course as Ethena (ENA) and near protocol (NEAR) slipped about 9% and 8.6%, respectively, over 24 hours. ENA dropped to around $0.25 after earlier touching multi-week highs, while NEAR pulled back below $5.00.
Memecoins showed localized resilience, led by dogwifhat (WIF), which added 6.2% over 24 hours to trade near $0.26. Memecoin launchpad token pump.fun (PUMP) also saw renewed buying, ticking up nearly 4% as speculative capital rotated within the sector.
Stacks (STX) and Midnight (NIGHT) both paused their sharp multi-day rallies, slipping roughly 5% and 5.6%, respectively, over 24 hours. STX held around $0.38 following Wednesday’s executive leadership announcement, while NIGHT pulled back to $0.04 after gaining more than 20% earlier in the week.