Ethereum Liquidations Hit $165.4M as Open Interest Drops 4.1%
Ethereum derivatives just absorbed a heavy long-side flush: $165.4M was liquidated over 24 hours, including $147.0M in the latest hour, while open interest fell 4.1% in one hour to $25.67B. ETH is trading at $2,613.30, down 3.5%, making this a clear deleveraging event rather than a quiet spot-market pullback.
Longs Took the Damage
The liquidation imbalance is unusually one-sided. Long positions accounted for $159.1M of the 24-hour total, compared with $6.7M for shorts. The latest hour shows the same pattern, with $147.0M in long liquidations against $1.1M in shorts. The largest recorded hit was a $26.3M ETHUSDC long liquidation on Binance at $2,588.48. Other large long closures appeared at $2,615.19 and $2,618.73, showing that forced selling remained active close to the current market.
The four-hour window contains $148.5M in liquidations, while the 12-hour figure reached $155.0M. That concentration suggests the liquidation wave accelerated recently instead of building evenly across the session.
Open Interest Is Being Cut
Total derivatives open interest stands near $25.63B across 20 tracked venues, down 2.8% over 24 hours. Binance holds $6.05B, or 23.6% of the total, and its open interest declined 2.1% over 24 hours. The sharper contractions came from OKX, down 7.1% to $1.50B, and Bybit, down 3.9% to $2.12B. Their four-hour declines were 8.6% and 6.3%, respectively.
This broad reduction matters because price weakness is arriving alongside position closure. ETH’s one-hour RSI is 29.0, indicating short-term oversold conditions, while the four-hour RSI is 39.2. The negative annualized basis of 13.6% also shows that futures are trading at a meaningful discount, although positive average funding means the remaining leveraged book is not uniformly positioned for further downside.
Positioning Still Favors Longs
Account positioning remains crowded on the long side: 66.8% of accounts are long overall. Binance shows 73.1% long accounts, Bybit 68.3%, and Bitget 69.9%. Taker flow is more defensive, however. Binance takers are 85.4% short, while OKX takers are 57.2% short. The conflict between long account balances and aggressive short taker flow indicates that traders are selling into the liquidation event rather than calmly adding exposure.
Verdict: The immediate risk remains bearish while ETH trades below the $2,655.85 liquidation level and open interest stays near or below $25.63B. A break under $2,588.48 would expose the liquidation cluster, while a reclaim of $2,655.85 accompanied by open interest rising above $25.67B would invalidate the downside-continuation view. Data as of 10:05 Beijing time on Oct 7, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.