It's not just gold that is celebrating the return of the race to the rates bottom which ensures that real rates around the globe are (or will soon be) negative for a long time, with analysts starting to whisper that NIRP may be coming to the US, making inert, zero-yielding assets attractive.

Bitcoin left for dead as recently as one year ago, has exploded in the past two months, and after trading at $4,000 at the start of April, the cryptocurrency has been soaring and overnight spiked to just shy of $10,000, trading at $9,810 at last check.

Bitcoin's performance is relatively mild in the context of all cryptos, where one of the smaller crypto peers, Litecoin, has sported an impressive 370% YTD return.

But more important than what has happened is what will happen, and courtesy of our friends at sk3w.co, we find that crypto derivatives markets "are gearing up towards another big weekend as bitcoin approaches $10k."

More notably, all September futures have already breached $10k on the crypto native platforms

Open interest for Bitmex's bitcoin perpetual swap (XBTUSD contract) - the most liquid bitcoin derivatives instrument globally with ADV this month ~ $3bln - is at year highs of $840MM, according to sk3w...

On the institutional side, CME bitcoin futures total open interest also reached an all-time high last night with ~ $273mln notional open.

The current session so far has been "surprisingly quiet" as excitement is building in the market - no liquidation > $2.5mln today on Bitmex.

On the options side - vol has been picking up and skew coming off to further negative territories indicating call buying flows

Meanwhile, the options market backed probability of bitcoin > $15k at Sep expiry is currently 14%.

One final observation: Sundays have recently been especially busy recently!

Source: sk3w.co