Altcoins surged across the board Friday as Bitcoin consolidated near $84,000, with 93 of the CoinDesk 100 constituents posting gains over the past 24 hours. The altcoin season index climbed to 56, its highest reading in more than three months, up from 45 a week ago and 38 a month ago.

Bitcoin reached almost $87,000 on Tuesday before trading sideways. The cryptocurrency settled at $84,342 on Friday, unchanged since midnight UTC. The consolidation follows a climb from below $63,000 in August.

Capital rotation into altcoins reflects a pattern seen in previous market cycles when Bitcoin stalls after a strong run. Elevated funding costs for long positions are pushing traders toward more speculative bets across smaller-cap tokens.

Computing and DeFi tokens lead

Computing tokens posted the largest gains. Quant surged 39% over 24 hours, while Chainlink climbed 12% and Internet Computer rose 10%. The CoinDesk Computing Index jumped 9.5% over the period. The DeFi Select Index gained 8.7%, with Uniswap up 0.67% on the day and Lido DAO rising 20% over 24 hours.

Ondo, a tokenized treasuries token, posted a 32% gain over 24 hours and set a new futures open interest record of 1.07 billion tokens. Zcash, a privacy token, climbed 16% over the week, with its futures open interest jumping 15.9% and its annualized funding rate reaching 10%. Monero, another privacy token, gained 1.0% since midnight.

Artificial Superintelligence Alliance rose 18% over a rolling window, while Ethena, a synthetic dollar token, climbed 10% over the day. Bittensor gained 5.4% over 24 hours. Raydium, a Solana-based DEX token, and Bonk each fell 3.4% and 2.7%, respectively. Litecoin declined 1.6%.

Broader market metrics

The CoinDesk 80 index rose 4.7%, while the CoinDesk 5 gained 1.0%. The blended benchmark climbed 2.5%. Bitcoin futures open interest approached 700,000 BTC, with Binance whales showing a long-short ratio of 1.33 and a position ratio of 1.87.

Trading volume fell to $206 billion, down 17%, while open interest climbed to $153 billion, up 1.8%. Liquidations totaled $228 million, down 63% from prior levels. A $17 billion tranche of BTC and ETH options expired Friday, with the most-traded BTC call strike at $70,000 and the second most-traded at $90,000. The most-traded ETH call strike was $2,800.

Bitcoin spot ETFs erased a $5.8 billion hole in cumulative flows, signaling renewed institutional demand.

Bitget hack disclosed

Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange, disclosed an overnight hack totaling $351.6 million. The company’s user protection fund stands at $464 million, sufficient to cover the loss.

Gracy Chen, Chief Executive of Bitget, said that “private key compromise has been ruled out” as the attack vector. The company did not disclose additional details about the breach mechanism or timeline for recovery.