Major selloff the day after Christmas Day as Bitcoin dropped 10% in Spot markets, and even more on the futures market. Quarterly contracts were stable at $480 before making a massive drop within 6 hours down to $410, an over 15% move. 
Looking at the CryptoFacilities Price Index we can get a good appreciation for how precipitous it was:

Huge news from BitMEX today as they are offering a whopping 0.1% rebate for maker traders who are providing liquidity to the market with limit orders that get filled.

CEO Arthur Hayes is calling it "the rebirth of the XBU series". Which is appropriate given that they have had a lot of trouble getting liquidity on those XBU contracts which tended to have longer expiration times.

The fees for taker orders will be 0.3% to balance out this rebate, and to compensate the exchange for the risk of insuring settlement with no DPE. The leverage is only 5x on XBU though so the risk of losses to the system is a lot lower as well, as long as the liquidity remains healthy.

It's nice to see this effort by BitMEX to attract more hedging activity rather than raw high leverage speculation. Futures serve multiple purposes and to use them purely as speculative instruments without allowing legitimate hedgers to get utility from them is missing out on a big part of the equation.

They've also had some pretty harsh socialized losses (DPEs) recently, and the XBU series have guaranteed settlement so you don't have socialized losses on them, hence the higher fee.

The contract is only a couple hours old but the liquidity is GREAT. The spread is only $0.01 (one cent) right now, so the negative fee is really incentivizing some liquidity provision in this orderbook. It helps that it's currently the only hedging contract they have offered right now too. Check out the orderbook: 

Bitcoin has been finding a bit of a range in the past week, holding strong in the mid 400s, as Bitstamp price above indicates.
​
However sentiment is starting to point bearish as indicated from the bitcoin futures markets, here's OKCoin right now:

Reuters has come out with a very bullish toned article on bitcoin price.  For those who don't know: Reuters is one of the most influential news wire services in the world. Along with Associated Press they are major feeders for news stories that papers around the world use for ideas and articles.

It talks about the halvening and uses quotes from different people in the industry, including:

• Daniel Masters, co-founder of Jersey-based Global Advisors' multi-million dollar bitcoin hedge fund
• Bobby Lee, the chief executive of one of the leading bitcoin exchanges in China, BTCC
• Jeremy Millar, partner at London-based financial technology specialists Magister Advisors

Check it out, you may use it as a counter-indicator if you think the media is behind on things, but either way Bitcoin in Reuters, global media wire, is something to watch.