Potential Path to US-Iran Peace Spurs Bullish Ethereum Positioning

President Donald Trump has followed up his two-week ceasefire announcement with additional signals that further US-Iran peace negotiations are on the cards.

Such signals have driven a simultaneous decline in oil prices and rally in risk-on sentiment. 

As such, BTC briefly traded to as high as $76K, a one-month high, while derivatives markets for ETH temporarily skewed towards call options – a rare occurrence so far this year.

While ETH options traders temporarily skewed bullish, the same cannot be said for BTC options traders just yet.

Skew for short-dated options tenors have recovered meaningfully, though 7-day options, for example, continue to trade with a put premium of -3%.

Block Scholes’ Risk-Appetite Indexes for both major assets have once more crossed over the -0.5 threshold from below; a crossing that has typically marked a transition into a more bullish market regime.

Block Scholes’ Risk Appetite Index measures the level of euphoria (above 1) or panic (below -1) in the spot market. Momentum in this index shows a strong relationship to spot returns.

Cryptos sensitive to Iran war headlines 

The past week and a half has seen a whipsaw of headline changes regarding the prospects of a permanent end to a US-Iran war which is quickly approaching 50 days in length. 

• On April 7, 2026, President Trump announced the two sides had entered into a conditional two-week ceasefire.
• Over the weekend, delegates from both sides took part in a marathon 21-hour negotiation in Islamabad seeking to settle their differences, though left without a formal peace agreement. 
• In the aftermath of the negotiations, President Trump claimed that “the meeting went well”, but Iran had failed to meet the US’s demands regarding its nuclear ambitions – as such, “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz”. 
• Only a few days later, President Trump then took to a number of news outlets claiming optimism around the likelihood of a second-round of negotiations, which could bear the fruits of a longer-lasting end to the war.

As markets have begun to price in the path towards peace, risk-sentiment has rebounded. 

The chart below plots BTC and ETH’s spot price, with the three vertical lines representing:

• the April 7 ceasefire
• the failed weekend negotiations
• and Trump’s media comments that the war is close to over. 

BTC briefly rose to as high as $76K on the back of the latter, a level it last traded at on March 17, 2026, while ETH has firmly recaptured the $2,300 region.

In options markets, volatility levels for short-term expirations fell by over 10 points in the aftermath of the ceasefire. 

Despite President Trump’s later announcement that the US military would begin a naval blockade of the key Hormuz waterway, traders have been reluctant to price back in the same level of uncertainty that they saw prior to the ceasefire announcement. 

From the moment President Trump suggested a path to de-escalation, we’ve seen traders in spot markets push spot prices higher, and traders in options markets release some of their volatility expectations across the surface. 

As expectations for a possible de-escalatory move increase, we’re beginning to see tentative signs that traders are indeed turning bullish over a near-term horizon, and most notably in ETH. 

The chart below shows the premium assigned to put options (i.e. a negative 25-delta skew). Not only have traders entirely priced out the bearish volatility premium from when the conflict began, but short-dated 7-day and 30-day ETH options have briefly tilted positive over the past week as bullish positions become more desirable.

That premium towards OTM call options has been a rare phenomenon for most of this year and is the strongest indication yet, since the conflict began, that traders are not only indeed beginning to see green shoots of a path towards ending the conflict, but also backing that with optimistic forward looking expectations for spot price. 

This is in contrast to the late-March episode, where markets remained hesitant despite President Trump’s post about a pause before targeting Iran’s energy infrastructure  - both spot and options markets did not meaningfully react in a bullish manner back then.

We are yet to see as strong a shift towards call options in BTC, however.

Skew has meaningfully recovered across short and longer-dated expiries, though the 7-day 25-delta put call skew is still trading close to -3% while 90-day skew is closer to -2%.