Pace quickens

Stronger hands seek to hold sway today and throughout the weekend in the wake of this week's crypto sell-off, said to be led by weaker ones, i.e. retail investors.

Meanwhile, in the options market, a witching hour duel has bulls and bears in a test of wills, and of theories regarding where Bitcoin and Ethereum might be bound.

As for the largest of all cryptos, BTC makes it to Friday morning with a spring in its step, reclaiming $60,000 after falling to as low as $56,800 early Wednesday.

More than 23,000 BTC contracts (worth $1.4 billion) are set to expire today, possibly creating more turbulence as the $61K mark looms large as a maximum pain point, or, in other words, the price that would cause the highest amount of losses for the greatest number of contract holders (Cointelegraph).

Based on data from the Deribit options exchange, traders are purchasing more calls than puts, a bullish sign.

Momentum would seem to be on the side of BTC, which rose 2% in the spot markets over the past 24 hours, reaching and maintaining the $60K mark as of 9 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko.

BTC is down 6% over the past week. It is down nearly 20% since its all-time high of $73,740 was reached on March 14.

The biggest coin's astonishing 34% gain in Q1 can't be overlooked and is still being commemorated. This early-year surge helped Coinbase harvest some $1.2 billion in quarterly net income, part of a "blow out" earnings report that has analysts hiking longer-term price targets on COIN shares (CoinDesk).

Additionally, shares of Block, formerly Square, jumped 7.5% in after-hours trading following better-than-expected Q1 earnings. The payments company, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, revealed plans to earmark 10% of monthly BTC-related gross profits for new BTC purchases to supplant an existing stash of 8,000 BTC worth $482M.

Ethereum options contracts worth $1 billion are set to expire today, setting up a steel-cage wrestling match at the $3,000 mark.

Where this goes remains a speculative bet impacted by fast-shifting, mercurial dynamics. But we do know this: a put-to-call ratio below 0.7 is considered bullish; and the expiring ETH contracts have a put-to-call ratio of 0.37, according to Cointelegraph.

ETH was $3,026 as of Friday at 8:45 a.m. (EST).

The second-largest crypto has declined 3.3% in the past week.

We're not sure which "Troll" movie it was, possibly the Netflix one from 2022, but there's a scene where it turns out the giant isn't just hibernating in the mountains – he is the mountain – a beast of rock and earth, sleeping scarily in plain sight.

BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF at this point seems like it's always been there. It has amassed a huge pile of assets in only about four months.

Ever wonder how big the fund could grow if the world's sleeping institutional giants ever wake up to the splendors of crypto?

The world's largest asset manager has spent the past several years talking about BTC to heavyweights around the globe, including sovereign wealth funds, pension schemes and university endowments, entities tasked with allocating enormous long-term portfolios often totaling many billions of dollars.

Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, told CoinDesk that the coming months could see such behemoths start to trade in the spot ETFs. The firm is seeing a "re-initiation of the discussion around Bitcoin,” he said. “Many of these interested firms are having ongoing diligence and research conversations," Mitchnick said.

BlackRock's groundwork has emphasized education, with discussions centering on BTC from the standpoint of portfolio construction. In addition to crypto assets, Mitchnick explained, stablecoins and tokenization (representing traditional assets on the blockchain) have been the other two main conversational focal points.

"These pillars, they're all interrelated," Mitchnick said. "That's a really important thing for people to understand."