Ethena Bucks the Selloff: ENA Holds $0.142 as Short Liquidations Overtake Longs
On a day when most large caps are down 3-9%, Ethena's ENA is quietly green - up 0.2% at $0.1425. The liquidation tape shows why that small number matters: over the past four hours, $117K of short positions were forcibly closed against just $67K of longs, and over twelve hours the score is $185K shorts versus $89K longs. In a market flushing longs everywhere else, ENA is one of the few books where the shorts are the ones getting hurt.
News context: Wu Blockchain's weekly project roundup noted that Ethena has kicked off programmatic buybacks of ENA, a supply-side change that coincides with the token's unusual resilience on today's tape.
Open interest is building on every major venue
Total open interest sits at $292.0 million, flat on 24 hours - but the flatness hides accumulation. Binance, the largest book with a 26.4% share, grew 2.3% to $77.2 million. Bybit added 5.7% to $51.2 million, OKX rose 2.9% to $11.3 million and Bitget 2.5% to $31.7 million. All four majors expanding while price holds steady is constructive positioning, and it contrasts sharply with the double-digit open interest purges hitting XLM and other alts today. Funding is uneventful by design: the majors all sit at the +0.005% per 8 hours baseline, with only 1 of 23 venues negative - no crowding signal in either direction.
A split taker tape: Binance sells, Gate buys
Aggregate taker flow leans buy at 55.8%, but the venue split is stark. On Gate, 71.5% of aggressive volume is buying; on Binance, only 35.8% - Binance takers are net sellers by nearly two to one. Account positioning is long-biased at 63.3% overall, led by Bybit at 72.7%, with Binance and OKX both near 58.3%. The earlier flush marked the floor: the day's largest liquidations were longs at $0.1364-$0.1373 on Binance, a zone the market reclaimed and has not revisited. Momentum is dead neutral - the daily RSI at 50.5 and 4-hour at 51.4 give neither side an edge.
What relative strength on a red day is worth
Over the full 24 hours ENA still shows $978K in long liquidations versus $232K in shorts, so the day was not painless. The change happened in the last twelve hours, when the flow flipped and shorts became the side paying. That intraday reversal, plus growing open interest, is what separates rotation into a name from a mere dead-cat pause.
Our read: ENA is behaving like a token being accumulated against a weak tape, and the buyback program gives the bid a mechanical explanation. The structure to trade against is clear: $0.1364-$0.1373 is the reclaimed liquidation floor, and as long as ENA holds above it, the short side is fighting both a buyback and a rising open interest trend. The upside test comes if the broader market stabilizes - relative strength names typically lead the bounce, and a move through $0.15 would force the Binance taker sellers to chase. Invalidation is a drop back into the $0.136 zone on expanding open interest, which would mean the accumulation read was wrong and the earlier long flush resumes. Until then, this is one of the few alt perp books where dips are being bought by the aggressive flow that matters.
Data as of 23:45 Beijing time on Sept 16, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, Hyperliquid, HTX, KuCoin, MEXC and other major exchanges.