According to Nick Forster, the co-founder of Derive, the Bitcoin (BTC) rally has stalled slightly, holding firm at $109,000, while Ethereum (ETH) remains steady at $2,550.
Notably, volatility for both assets has stayed consistent, with BTC at 45% and ETH at 72%.
Bitcoin and Ethereum price outlook
In a news alert shared with Krypt News, Forster notes that short-term traders are anticipating an upward move, evidenced by a large buy-up of calls on the $112K BTC strike for May 30.
However, expectations for Bitcoin (BTC) to remain below $110K by June 27 are also building, with a significant number of calls sold for that expiry.
Market makers remain short gamma, meaning that as Bitcoin and Ethereum prices rise, they are forced to buy more to hedge, potentially triggering a short-term price spike.
Forster believes there’s a 10% chance of BTC surpassing $130K by the end of June, while ETH has a 15% chance of exceeding $3,100 by the end of June.
On Derive, for instance, BTC traders are positioning for a move upward while capitalizing on cheap volatility according to Derive Amberdata. Over the past 24 hours, 55.6% of premiums traded were calls bought, with 22.3% puts purchased.
For ETH, the distribution is more balanced, suggesting a more uncertain outlook and fairly priced volatility.
About Derive
Derive is a decentralized protocol designed for trading programmable options, perpetuals, and structured products onchain.
It was co-founded by Nick Forster, Jake Fitzgerald, Mike Spain and Dom Romanowski and it empowers users with easily accessible automated strategies to build, grow, and preserve wealth.
Derive ecosystem comprises of:
- Derive Protocol – a decentralized settlement layer supporting trustless margining, liquidations, and clearing for derivatives trading.
- Derive Chain – an OP Stack rollup optimized for high-throughput and low-latency settlement, bridging seamlessly with Ethereum.
- Risk Engine – a modular framework enabling custom risk management strategies for diverse financial products.
- Matching Engine – an institutional-grade order matching system for options and perpetual futures.
- Derive DAO – it is the body that governance Derive. It accrues trading fees to an insurance fund, enhancing system resilience and also manages protocol upgrades, fee distribution, and liquidity incentives, promoting long-term sustainability.
- DRV tokens – this is the governance token. Currently valued at $0.02713, with a market cap of $20.01 million according to Coinmarketcap. The DRV token holders form the Derive DAO.
On May 14, 2025, decentralized finance platform Synthetix revealed it is planning to re-acquire Derive in a token exchange deal, pricing 1 SNX token to 27 DRV tokens, which would value Derive at around $27 million. However, the deal is pending approval by the Spartan Council and Derive governance.
According to DefiLlama, Derive currently commands a total volume locked (TVL) of 82.58 million with a 24-hour perps volume of $2.17 million.