BICO +23% to $0.0237: OI Up 56%, Funding Still Negative
BICO Rallies 22.9% as Open Interest Jumps 55.7%
BICO, the token behind the Biconomy account-abstraction toolkit, climbed 22.9% in 24 hours to $0.02371. The move was not driven by a short squeeze. Futures open interest across venues rose 55.7% to $19.8 million, meaning fresh capital is building positions, while liquidations in BICO stayed near zero during the same window.
Binance priced BICO at $0.02371 with a 24-hour high of $0.02443 and low of $0.01863. OKX showed $0.02360 with the same high and low. The two venues tracked each other closely through the whole move, so the rally is broad rather than concentrated on a single order book.
Funding Turns Deeply Negative: Shorts Are Paying to Stay
The most unusual part of this rally is the funding picture. BICO funding rates across Binance, Bybit, Bitget, Gate and KuCoin all sit between -0.70% and -0.78% per eight-hour window. A deeply negative funding rate normally appears when a market is crowded with shorts. Here it is paired with a rising price and rising open interest, which creates a squeeze setup even if the actual liquidation data has not caught up yet.
On Binance, funding printed -0.729% while open interest rose 45.1%. OKX showed funding at -0.73% with OI up 79% in the last 24 hours. Bybit added 52.5% to its BICO book. The divergence between price momentum and the cost of holding a short position is the core tension in this market right now.
What the Leverage Build Means for the Next Move
Open interest growing 55.7% while the price holds near the 24-hour high suggests new longs are entering, not that existing positions are being covered. In the previous rounds of this altcoin rotation, the pattern was the same: a negative funding rate, a spike in open interest, and then a violent move once one side is forced out.
BICO is a small-cap contract market at roughly $19.8 million in total open interest, with Binance holding a 34.2% share. Small books react faster to leverage imbalances. If the price keeps grinding up with funding still negative, the path of least resistance remains higher because shorts keep paying. If it rolls over, expect the funding rate to flip positive quickly as longs take control of the fee flow.
What Traders Should Watch
The number to track is the funding rate, not the price. As long as funding stays negative while open interest climbs, the rally has fuel. A shift of funding back to positive territory would signal that new longs have filled the book and the squeeze setup is spent.
Volume reached $115.2 million across spot and derivatives in 24 hours, well above BICO's recent average, which confirms this is not a thin-book move. The combination of a small open interest base and heavy volume leaves room for outsized swings in either direction.
Data as of 22:14 Beijing time on August 26, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Hyperliquid, Gate and other major exchanges.