ETH -2.8% to $2,399: $212.8M Longs Wiped in 24h, 87% of All Liquidations
Ether's latest push higher has run into a wall. ETH is trading near $2,398.79, down 2.8% in the past 24 hours, after a rally toward $2,508.75 failed to hold and sellers took the price down to $2,356.05. The move looks modest in percentage terms, but the derivatives tape shows the pain is concentrated almost entirely on one side of the book: $212.8 million of long positions were force-closed over the past day against just $32.4 million of shorts. That is 87% of the $245.3 million total liquidated across the market.
Price failed at $2,508 and rolled straight into the long stack
The setup is familiar from the past two weeks. ETH pushed to a 24-hour high of $2,508.75 on a burst of buying, but the follow-through never materialised and the price slipped back through $2,400 with little resistance. Once $2,420 broke, the liquidation engines did the rest. In the last four hours alone, $3.72 million of longs were closed versus $1.37 million of shorts — still long-heavy, but a fraction of the daily damage, which tells you the bulk of the wipeout happened earlier in a single cascade rather than through a slow grind.
$25.8 billion of open interest, and Binance holds the biggest book
Open interest across major venues stands at roughly $25.79 billion for ETH. Binance remains the largest pool at $5.60 billion, or 21.7% of the total, followed by CME at $3.77 billion (14.6%) and Gate at $2.80 billion (10.9%). Hyperliquid, the on-chain venue that has absorbed a growing share of perp flow this year, sits at $2.31 billion (9.0%), ahead of Bybit at $1.89 billion and Bitget at $1.83 billion. That distribution matters: when CME holds nearly 15% of Ether's open interest, a meaningful part of the market is institutional and far less likely to be running the kind of leverage that gets liquidated in an afternoon. The retail-heavy venues are where the $212.8 million came from.
What the one-sided liquidation mix actually tells you
A 87/13 long-to-short liquidation split with price down only 2.8% means the market was leaning long into the drop — traders were positioned for continuation higher, and the failed breakout at $2,508 trapped them. This is the third time in September that ETH has been unable to hold a push above $2,500, and each rejection has cleared leverage without breaking the range low. That is constructive in the medium term: excess longs are being removed rather than the market building a larger short base. The levels that frame the next move are simple — $2,356 on the downside, the 24-hour low, and $2,508 on the upside. A daily close above the range high with open interest rising would mark a genuine breakout; another rejection would simply repeat today's pattern.
Data as of 09:30 Beijing time on Sept 16, covering Binance, CME, Gate, Hyperliquid, Bybit, Bitget, OKX, MEXC and other major exchanges.