ETC OI Down 15.7%: MEXC -66.8%, Price Holds $7.75
ETC Open Interest Shrinks 15.7% in One Day
ETC open interest dropped from roughly $79 million to $66.7 million in the past 24 hours, a 15.7% decline, while the coin itself only lost about 3%. The pullback is visible on every major venue: Binance OI is down 3.1%, OKX down 8.5%, Bybit down 2.5% and KuCoin down 9.9%. This is not a single-exchange glitch, it is a broad reduction of ETC leverage positions across the market.
MEXC Cut Two-Thirds of Its ETC Positions
The outlier is MEXC. Its ETC open interest fell 66.8% in 24 hours, from roughly $14.7 million to $4.9 million, leaving it with about 7.3% of total OI. No other venue moved anywhere near that size. When one exchange sheds two-thirds of a coin's contracts while everyone else trims a few percent, the usual explanation is a specific trader or group exiting size, not market-wide panic. The contracts left on MEXC are now a fraction of what Binance, Bybit or Bitget hold.
Price and Funding Say This Was Orderly
ETC traded between $7.63 and $8.01 in the last 24 hours and sits near the middle of that range at $7.75 on both Binance and OKX. Funding rates tell the same story: the average rate across venues is effectively zero, with Binance at 0.01% and OKX slightly negative. A violent unwind usually shows up as a funding spike or a liquidation cascade. ETC did not even appear in the top 30 of the network liquidation leaderboard, where the last entry was under $0.7 million. The deleveraging here looks like voluntary position closing rather than forced selling.
What Comes After the ETC Flush
With leverage cleaned out, the immediate forced-selling pressure on ETC is gone. But the same data explains why the coin is not bouncing: there is no fresh money coming in yet. A recovery needs either a new catalyst or a sustained move in Bitcoin to pull ETC along. Watch two things in the coming days: whether MEXC keeps shrinking its book, and whether funding turns meaningfully positive, which would signal new longs are willing to pay for exposure.
Data as of 06:45 Beijing time on August 25, 2026, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate, Bitget, Hyperliquid and other major exchanges.