Diverging trends: Ether slides below $2,000 while futures open interest hits record high of 16 million ETH
Ether drops below $2,000 amid heavy selling pressure, yet futures open interest hits a record high. This divergences suggests aggressive shorting.
What to know:
- Ether has fallen below $2,000 for the first time since March amid rising risk aversion, with losses of nearly 8% over the past week.
- Open interest in ether futures has hit a record high even as prices drop, a combination that suggests aggressive leveraged selling and a bearish market tilt.
- Investor sentiment toward ether has soured, with U.S. spot ETFs seeing net outflows, high-profile departures from the Ethereum Foundation, and growing doubts about how Ethereum’s ecosystem strength benefits the ETH token.
“More and more people giving up on ETH as it doesn’t generate revenue and with higher bond yields the staking yield is unattractive. The only buyer has been Bitmine but they indicated that they will slow down their purchases,” Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, said in an email.
What makes ether’s sell-off particularly interesting is that open interest in ether futures has risen for the third straight day, hitting a record high of 16.39 million tokens, according to data source Coinglass. That equates to a notional open interest of about $32.5 billion. In simple terms, more money is flowing into futures, a leveraged product that amplifies both gains and losses.
However, this record open interest, combined with a negative seven-day OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD) and the falling spot price, points to aggressive net selling. A negative CVD indicates that price action is being driven by traders taking bearish bets via market orders rather than passive limit orders.
