Bitcoin, ether rise as altcoins lag in low-volatility trade

Bitcoins Bitcoin, ether rise as altcoins lag in low-volatility trade

Bitcoins Bitcoin and ether tick higher, but weak altcoin breadth, heavy liquidations and elevated options hedging suggest traders remain cautious.

Feb 19, 2026, 11:30 a.m.

Bitcoin BTC$68,475.70 and ether (ETH) both rose around 0.9% overnight while the broader altcoin market lagged on Thursday.

BTC was recently trading at $67,000 following a brief touch of $66,000 on Wednesday. Ether, at $1,970 after bouncing off $1,924, is struggling to break through the psychological $2,000 price level.

Volatility has waned since the selloff on Feb. 5. Two subsequent weeks of consolidation have left investors wondering whether this is the calm before another stormy move to the downside, or whether the market is establishing a macro low before rising back toward 2025 levels.

World Liberty Financial’s Mar-a-Lago forum on Wednesday failed to provide a bullish catalyst despite being attended by CFTC Chairman Michael Selig and executives from companies including Goldman Sachs.

From a macro perspective, bitcoin remains in a downtrend since hitting a record high of $126,600 in early October. It has notched a series of lower highs and lower lows with periods of choppy consolidation in between each major move.

Derivatives positioning

• Market dynamics have stabilized with open interest holding at $15.38 billion.
• That marks a transition from a leverage cleanup to a steady floor.
• Retail sentiment shows a subtle rebound with funding rates flipping flat to positive (Binance back at 4%), while institutional conviction remains anchored with the three-month annualized basis persisting at 3%.
• The BTC options market has reached a 50/50 volume equilibrium between calls and puts. While the one-week 25-delta skew has edged up to 12%, the implied volatility (IV) term structure remains in short-term backwardation.
• The front-end spike in the IV curve confirms that traders are still paying a “panic premium” for immediate protection, even as longer-dated tenors stabilize near 49%.
• Coinglass data shows $218 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 77-23 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($75 million), ETH ($53 million) and others ($22 million) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations.
• The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $67,400 as a core liquidation level to monitor in case of a price rise.

Token talk

• The altcoin market is starting to suffer in the low-liquidity trading environment.
• Shares of WLFI$0.09681 lost more than 10% of their value after selling off during Wednesday’s event in a classic “sell the news” move.
• Axie Infinity (AXS) is retesting its Feb. 6 lows after falling 5.9% since midnight UTC.
• Lending platform Morpho’s native MORPHO token has now given back all of Wednesday’s gains, trading at $1.39 after shedding 4.2% of its value overnight.
• A whopping 97 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies, not including stablecoins or tokenized gold tokens, are in the red over the past 24 hours as the market remains in “extreme fear” territory.
• The fear and greed index is currently at 11/100, up from February’s low of 6/100.

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Resolv stablecoin crashes 70% as attacker extracts $25 million in ETH

The protocol holds $95 million in assets against $173 million in liabilities, leaving it functionally insolvent. USR is trading at $0.27, down 72% in a week.

What to know:

• Resolv’s USR stablecoin lost its dollar peg after an attacker exploited a flaw in its minting contract to create about 80 million unbacked tokens and extract roughly $25 million.
• The exploit stemmed from structural design failures, including a single-key controlled privileged account, no oracle or amount checks, and no maximum mint limits, allowing the attacker to receive 50 million USR for a 100,000 USDC deposit.
• USR briefly crashed to just over 2 cents and was trading around 27 cents as of Monday, while Resolv urged users not to trade the token and said it is working with law enforcement and on-chain analytics firms to recover assets.

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