As bitcoin (BTC) and ether’s (ETH) recovery rally gathered momentum Tuesday, the perpetual futures market saw an even more pronounced increase in open interest, pointing to growing investor confidence as the Trump administration dialed back on its trade-tariff, anti-Fed rhetoric.

BTC, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, rose 6.79% nearly topping $94,000 for the first time since March, CoinDesk data show. That’s the most significant single-day percentage gain since April 9. The Ethereum blockchain’s ether token jumped 11% to $1,1175, it’s best performance since April 2.

The rally came as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discussed de-escalation in U.S.-China trade tensions, followed by President Donald Trump saying tariffs on Chinese goods will drop substantially from the present 245%. Trump further said he does not intend to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The price surge was characterized by traders deploying money for perpetual futures trading on major offshore exchanges as evidenced by bigger increases in open interest at Binance, Bybit, OKX and Deribit and leading on-chain perpetual-focused decentralized exchange Hyperliquid.

The cumulative notional open interest, or the dollar value of the number of active bets in BTC perpetual futures, rose by 10% to $17.83 billion, according to data source Velo. That’s the biggest single-day increase since March 2, when Trump mentioned XRP, ADA and SOL as potential candidates for a strategic digital assets reserve that would hold bitcoin and ether as the core. The administration later said it would keep bitcoin seized in enforcement actions as a reserve.

«Bitcoin’s Open Interest surged faster than its Price, with most positions originating from Binance,» Joao Wedson, CEO of Alphractal Research, said on X. «The issue is that a large portion consists of Longs, so increased volatility is expected in the coming hours.»

The price surge was likely aided by short squeeze, or unwinding of short perpetual futures bets. Funding rates were negative roughly 24 hours ago, implying a bias for shorts.

Ether’s notional open interest jumped nearly 16% to $6.60 billion, the largest single-day increase since Nov. 27.

An increase in open interest alongside a price rise is said to confirm the bullish momentum. In other words, BTC and ETH could continue to rise.

Funding Rates Bullish

The bias for bullish long positions is also evident from the moderately positive annualized perpetual funding rates, ranging between annualized 5% to 10% for BTC and ETH.

Funding rates, charged every eight hours, are payments exchanged between traders holding long and short positions in perpetual futures. They are designed to ensure the contract price stays close to the underlying asset’s spot price.

A positive funding rate implies that traders are more inclined and willing to pay fees to hold long positions. As such, it’s considered a sign of bullish sentiment. However, excessively high funding rates can indicate overcrowding or bullish speculative fervor, but that’s not the case right now.

Bitcoin (BTC) has become the fifth-largest asset by market capitalization, reaching $1.86 trillion and surpassing Google (GOOG) as it breaks through $94,000.

This marks the highest position bitcoin has ever attained in the rankings, even though its market cap previously exceeded $2 trillion when its price was over $109,000. At that time, however, tech stocks were significantly more elevated than they are at the moment.

Bitcoin has just broken above $94,000, turning positive for the year. Renewed optimism is emerging amid easing tensions in the U.S.–China tariff trade war, which has fueled gains for both bitcoin and tech stocks, with Nasdaq futures rising 2%.

Technically, bitcoin has now moved above key resistance levels that were noted on Tuesday. Additionally, it has set a new record relative to the Nasdaq, indicating a breakout not only against major tech indices but also across a range of key asset classes.

A threat actor seemingly exploited an XRP Ledger’s developer access token to publish illicit code to the burgeoning network in a move that could have been “catastrophic” for the network, the security team that spotted the issue said in an update.

Charlie Eriksen, a researcher at Aikido Security who first spotted the problem, said a hidden issue was added to recent versions of a new toolkit used to build apps that work with the XRP Ledger.

“A developer’s NPM access token was stolen by the threat actors,” Aikido said on X. “It is unclear how right now. It is also unclear who the threat actors are right now (although we have a hunch we are trying to confirm).”

The issue only affects versions of Node Package Manager (NPM), a site where developers share reusable code for projects. Major XRP-related services, like Xaman Wallet and XRPScan, said they were unaffected in separate X posts.

This flaw could let attackers steal users’ private keys, possibly accessing their crypto wallets in theory.

«At 21 Apr, 20:53 GMT+0, our system, Aikido Intel started to alert us to five new package version of the xrpl package. It is the official SDK for the XRP Ledger, with more than 140.000 weekly downloads,» Eriksen said in a security update.

«This package is used by hundreds of thousands of applications and websites making it a potentially catastrophic supply chain attack on the cryptocurrency ecosystem,» Eriksen noted.

He added that only third-party apps or services that installed the flawed versions during a brief period could be at risk.

As such, the XRP Ledger Foundation team quickly fixed the issue by releasing updated versions of the tool to replace the faulty ones. The affected versions (v4.2.1-4.2.4 and v2.14.2) were deprecated.

«To clarify: This vulnerability is in xrpl.js, a JavaScript library for interacting with the XRP Ledger. It does NOT affect the XRP Ledger codebase or Github repository itself. Projects using xrpl.js should upgrade to v4.2.5 immediately,» the foundation posted separately.

A JavaScript library is a collection of pre-written code to simplify tasks in web development. A GitHub repo is an online storage space for a project’s code, files, and history, hosted on GitHub.

XRP prices are up 8.5% in the past 24 hours alongside a broader market jump.