AVAX Open Interest Jumps 6.6% to $217.8M as Account Longs Clash With Taker Flow
Avalanche is up 4.5% to $7.569 in the past 24 hours, and derivatives desks piled in behind the move: open interest across tracked venues jumped 6.61% to $217.8M even as it slipped 0.62% in the last hour, hinting the rally has already cooled from its peak. Avalanche futures are also trading at a discount to spot, with the perp basis at -0.053% (-19.3% annualized) — a backwardation that sits awkwardly next to a bullish spot move and points to lingering hedging pressure rather than pure momentum chasing.
Where the New OI Is Landing
Binance still commands the book with $65.6M in open interest, a 30.1% share of the market, and its OI expanded 10.5% over 24 hours — the fastest growth among the top venues. Bybit is a distant second at $48.6M (22.3% share) but grew a comparable 7.7%. Bitget's $21.4M (9.8% share) rose 3.6%, while OKX's $11.0M (5.0% share) added just 2.4%. The pattern is clear: the incremental leverage this session is concentrating on Binance and Bybit, not spreading evenly across the top four, which raises the odds that any unwind gets funneled through the same two order books.
Accounts Are Long, Flow Isn't
Positioning data shows a real split. On an account basis, longs dominate at 69% overall, and every major venue confirms it: Bybit accounts run 74.3% long (a 2.89:1 ratio), Binance 67.7% long (2.10:1), OKX 64.2% long (1.79:1) and Gate 62.5% long (1.67:1). But taker flow tells a different story — the aggregate taker long share is just 47.4%, and Binance's own taker book is net short at 42.0% long versus 58.0% short (a 0.73 ratio). Only Gate's taker flow leans long, at 58.1%. In other words, the crowd of open accounts is stacked long, but the aggressive, price-moving orders are skewing short — a classic setup where retail conviction and active flow are pulling in opposite directions.
Liquidations Flip Direction Across Windows
The liquidation data adds another layer to the divergence. Over the last 24 hours, $138,918 was liquidated in total, and longs took the bigger hit at $100,996 versus $37,923 for shorts — consistent with a leverage flush earlier in the session. But zoom into the shorter windows and the script flips: the 12h window shows $22,089 in short liquidations against just $7,656 in longs, the 4h window shows $7,636 short versus $4,904 long, and even the 1h window is short-liquidation-led ($334 versus $324). That means the more recent price action has been squeezing shorts, not longs — the exact opposite of what happened earlier in the day.
News context: Crypto Briefing reported that Aave is planning a real-world-asset hub on Avalanche with support for a dollar-pegged stablecoin, adding to a string of institutional integrations for the network this week.
Verdict
The setup is a tug-of-war, not a clean trend. Bulls need OI to hold above $210M while price clears $7.70-$7.75 without a fresh spike in short liquidations reversing back to long-side flushes — that would confirm the recent short squeeze is real demand, not just forced covering. The trade breaks down if taker long share keeps falling below 47% while account longs stay pinned near 69%: that gap widening further would signal the crowd is walking into a squeeze of its own, and a drop in OI back toward the $200M level alongside renewed long liquidations would be the tell that the unwind has started. Data as of 22:05 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.