ENA Open Interest Jumps 8.4% to $347M as Price Rallies 9%, Shorts Squeezed

Ethena's ENA token jumped 9.0% over the past 24 hours to $0.16402, and derivatives markets moved in lockstep: aggregate open interest climbed 8.4% to $346.97 million, with OI up another 2.5% in just the last hour. Funding rate spreads and liquidation data both point to a short-covering dynamic layered under fresh long positioning, while account-level long/short ratios diverge sharply from what actual taker flow shows.

Open Interest Surge Concentrated at Binance and Bitget

The OI expansion is not evenly spread. Data aggregated across 19 venues puts total ENA open interest at $345.91 million, up 8.06% on the day. Binance alone holds 25.94% of that pool ($89.75 million), up 8.62% in 24 hours and 2.89% in just the last four hours. Bybit is the second-largest venue at 17.44% share ($60.33 million, +6.88% 24h), while Bitget's smaller $37.24 million book (10.76% share) is growing fastest among the majors, up 12.36% in 24 hours and 3.34% in the last four. OKX, with a comparatively thin 3.83% share ($13.25 million), posted the largest 24h increase among the top venues at 10.81%. The pattern is broad-based OI growth across venues rather than a single-exchange anomaly, which typically signals real new positioning rather than a data artifact on one platform.

Funding Splits Between Majors and Outlier Venues

The aggregate funding rate stands at -0.0634% per 8-hour period, but that blended figure hides a split across venues. Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Gate, KuCoin and Whitebit are all charging a steady 0.005% per interval, in line with OKX's 0.0049% and Coinbase's 0.0025%. Dydx runs hotter at 0.0063% and Paradex hotter still at 0.01%, while Hyperliquid sits at just 0.00125% and Kraken is nearly flat at 0.0001%. The outliers pulling the aggregate negative are Edgex at -0.005% and, more dramatically, Coinex at -1.5%, a level steep enough to suggest thin liquidity on that venue rather than broad bearish positioning. Strip out those two and funding across the venues that actually carry ENA's open interest is modestly positive, consistent with the long-side bias building elsewhere in the data.

Long/Short Split Diverges From Liquidation Flow

Positioning data shows a similar tension between sentiment and flow. Ticker-level data puts account-level longs at 63.7% versus taker-side longs at just 49.1%, meaning traders are net-long by headcount but roughly balanced by actual volume traded. That gap widens further on Bybit, where 72.84% of accounts sit long (a 2.68:1 ratio), versus Gate, where taker flow is skewed the other way entirely at 27.41% long and 72.59% short. Binance is the most internally consistent venue, with account longs at 59.63% and taker longs at 59.64%, essentially matching.

Liquidation windows help explain the divergence. Over the past hour, $13,596.56 in ENA positions were liquidated, and $13,323.38 of that, roughly 98%, came from short sellers. The 4-hour window shows the same lopsided pattern: $184,644.26 in short liquidations against just $18,226.45 in longs, out of a $202,870.71 total. The skew narrows over the 12-hour window ($277,137.35 short versus $102,068.17 long) and nearly balances over 24 hours ($421,370.82 short versus $379,480.78 long, out of $800,851.60 total). That progression, heavily short-skewed in the most recent hours and more balanced across the full day, is consistent with a short squeeze that accelerated as the 9% rally took hold, rather than a liquidation event that happened earlier and faded. Notably, the single largest liquidation on record was a long position: a $75,688.59 forced close on Binance at $0.14688, roughly 18 hours before the current print, underscoring that the market had two-sided pain before shorts became the dominant casualty.

News context: Crypto Briefing reported that Ethena's founder is working to decouple the protocol's token from Bitcoin's price swings while also building an Ethena Pay neobank designed to route yield directly to users.

Verdict: the mix of broad-based OI growth, still-positive funding at the venues that carry most of the book, and a liquidation trail that flipped from long-heavy to overwhelmingly short-heavy within hours points to a genuine short squeeze feeding fresh long demand, not just deleveraging noise. The level to watch is $0.16402 spot with OI holding above $340 million intraday; a break above $0.168 while OI pushes past $360 million would confirm fresh longs are still arriving. The setup fails if ENA slips back under $0.155 while open interest unwinds below $320 million, marking the rally as short-covering that has already run its course rather than a durable positioning shift. Data as of 14:05 Beijing time on Sep 18, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.