I just saw a set of data, and it was a bit scary. On Wednesday, the trading volume of S&P 500 call options directly exploded to $2.6 trillion—this is almost equal to the total market capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency market. Honestly, it’s a little absurd.

To put it simply, in today’s U.S. stock market, most people are using call options to bet that the stock market will keep rising. This one-sided bullish sentiment has already spilled over onto Bitcoin. Since April, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have both been surging, and the spillover effect from this speculative heat has pushed BTC from over $70k to around $80k. The correlation between Bitcoin and the U.S. stock market has returned to the level of 2023—in other words, BTC is now moving in step with the rhythm of U.S. equities’ risk appetite.

At first glance, this appears to be good news for the crypto world, but I’ve been thinking lately that there are actually some significant hidden concerns behind it. When so much trading volume is squeezed into the same direction, once sentiment reverses, the consequences could be very grim. Goldman Sachs analysts have already described the current market state as a “semi-rational chasing pattern,” meaning that the rally’s gains have already moved away from fundamentals. Even more concerning is that the RSI of the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has surged to the highest level since the 1999 tech bubble. Historically, signals of such extreme overbought conditions usually don’t end well.

The current market atmosphere is like the peak of a party—everyone is celebrating, but everyone knows the party won’t last forever. Once the speculative frenzy in the U.S. stock market comes to an abrupt stop and funds quickly pull out, the risk of a sharp selloff will inevitably hit Bitcoin and the entire crypto market. This unusually high level of trading volume also reflects, to some extent, market overcrowding—too many people standing on the same side, which paradoxically becomes the biggest risk. As for how the market will move from here, it really needs careful handling.