Published: June 11th, 2025
A note to investors from Singapore-based digital asset management firm QCP Capital suggests Bitcoin's implied volatility has fallen to its lowest level in twelve months, settling down as the US-China trade dispute looks to be cooling after a new round of negotiations in London.
Drawn from analyzing futures and options data, implied volatility captures the market's evaluation of how much an asset's price is likely to fluctuate. The ongoing trade talks began in May and language from both sides suggests an agreement is in the offing. BTC, meanwhile, has remained above the USD 100,000 level, rising 4.5 per cent for the month to reach around USD 109,600 at time of writing.
‘US tariffs and economic tensions have generated knee-jerk responses from traders,’ QCP analysts said, ‘however they have not been large enough to prompt a directional breakout for Bitcoin or other major cryptos.’
As trade negotiations restarted this week, Bitcoin's implied volatility has settled out at one-year lows, which QCP says are ‘optically cheap.’
The apparent calm in crypto markets as Washington and Beijing battle over trade policy proves how much Bitcoin has grown in popularity as a neutral reserve asset. Squaring off amongst different investor groups, however, means BTC's price is range-bound as they position for opposing scenarios.
An employment data print published last week had a minimal impact on Bitcoin's price, with BTC trading flat following release of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' nonfarm payrolls report for May.
Data from CoinGlass shows that the options market for Bitcoin is leaning in the direction of call options over puts, with open interest at roughly 62% and volume at 62%.
An April 2025 analysis from Standard Chartered said Bitcoin could surge to a new all-time high of USD 120,000 by the end of this quarter (Q2 2025).
In a note to investors published, the bank said strategic portfolio reallocations away from American assets, plus growing institutional appetite for crypto, would likely push BTC even higher in the coming weeks.
Standard analysts wrote that ‘we are now looking at these cumulative factors as supports that will propel Bitcoin to a fresh all-time high in the range of USD 120,000 by the end of the second quarter.’
The note pointed to a number of key factors underpinning the bullish BTC outlook. One is the term premiums on US treasuries, which are now at their highest point in more than ten years. This points to heightened demand for non-dollar assets. Whale movement around Bitcoin has also intensified alongside growing corporate and institutional accumulation.
Recent ETF flows also suggested investor capital is moving from gold into Bitcoin, while time-of-day analysis indicates American investors are offloading domestic assets in favor of riskier alternative assets like Bitcoin.
With Bitcoin trading above USD 105,000 at time of writing, the number one cryptocurrency has risen by a factor of seven from lows seen in December 2022
Standard Chartered is holding firm on its year-end BTC price forecast of USD 200,000, noting that this quarter's predicted breakout could bring that figure into sharper focus.
February 2025 data from CoinWarz showed that Bitcoin's mining difficulty metric had reached an all-time high of 114.6 trillion.
The rise coincided with moves in the Hash Ribbon, a market indicator used by crypto traders to capture phases of mining capitulation and recovery, which can significantly influence BTC price movements. CoinWarz said the market had reached its capitulation point, when mining costs exceed profitability.
Historically, when the hash ribbon signals capitulation, it has marked a price bottom for BTC. Data from Glassnode show that miner capitulation started at the beginning of February. BTC's price had also dropped by about four per cent for the month-to-date.
If the pattern holds through Q2, CoinWarz says Bitcoin's new bottom will sit at around USD 91,000. The previous capitulation point happened in October 2024, just prior to BTC rocketing upward by 50 per cent.
The parallel rise in Bitcoin's mining difficulty metric has been caused by the rising hash rate for BTC transactions, which hit a new all-time high on February 5th. As difficulty rises, mining gets harder, requiring more computing resources, time, and energy.
Glassnode said recent mining production data reflects this, as only one publicly-traded mining company, Riot Platforms (RIOT), reported a month-over-month production increase in March 2025.
Taken together, the figures suggest that the world's number one crypto is following a trajectory last seen in 2017, up by about 580 per cent from the 2022 low reached in the aftermath of the FTX collapse.
In October 2023, BTC's mining difficulty reached a new high when it rose by 6.48 per cent, significantly raising the computational bar for miners seeking to uncover blocks.
Data from CoinWarz tracked the required number of hashes needed to mine a block at 61.02 trillion, marking the third consecutive rise in difficulty faced by miners since August of that year, and nearly double the difficulty level reached in October 2022.
Bitcoin's network is set to readjust every 2,016 blocks (in practice this has meant roughly once a fortnight), as the blockchain measures whether mining activity has increased or reduced the time needed to find a new block. An increase in time usually means more miners have joined the network.
The network responds by raising the level of mining difficulty. The complex equations that need to be solved become even more complex, and miners have to apply more computational power in order to mine a block.
Some analysts blamed the spike in activity on the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which was then about six months away.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Jeffery May, an executive with crypto exchange BTSE, said that the surge in mining activity ‘probably (meant) everyone is trying to maximise returns before next year's halving.’
