Ethereum Options Positioning Cools as Deribit OI Falls 3.6% Below $2,393
Ether is changing hands at $2,392.72, down 0.3% over the past 24 hours, and the derivatives book beneath that print is sending mixed signals. Ethereum's spot-perp basis has slipped to -0.05% (an annualized -18.0%), a mild backwardation that sits awkwardly next to a crowd still stacked long on the account books. Total open interest across 21 tracked venues is $23.70B, essentially flat on the day (+0.1%), but the composition underneath is shifting fast.
Options Book Thins While Perps Hold Ground
Deribit's ETH book — the venue where options flow shows up in the open interest tape — has fallen to $247.2M, just 1.0% of total open interest, down 3.6% in 24 hours and another 0.6% in the last four hours alone, the steepest pullback of any major venue. That contrasts with the perp-heavy majors: Binance remains the largest single book at $5.51B (23.3% share) despite a 0.8% dip, Gate holds $2.69B (11.4% share) after a 2.8% pullback, while Bitget's $1.83B book (7.7% share) actually grew 3.0% and Bybit's $1.89B (8.0% share) added 0.9%. With total open interest barely moving, the pattern looks like rotation away from Deribit's options-adjacent exposure and Gate's book into Bitget and Bybit, not capital leaving the market.
Funding Splits Tell a Different Story Than the Average
The blended funding rate across venues reads -0.0138% per 8h, which on its face looks like a shorts-pay-longs market. That number is dragged negative almost entirely by Coinex, an outlier printing -0.375%. Strip that out and every venue that actually carries ETH liquidity is positive: Bitget 0.004%, OKX 0.00424%, Binance 0.0029%, Bybit 0.0028%, Deribit 0.0024%. Longs are still paying a small premium on every major book — consistent with an account base that remains levered long into a market carrying negative basis.
Crowd Long, Tape Selling — and Where It Broke
Account-level positioning is one-sided: Binance shows 76.4% long (a 3.23x long/short ratio), Bitget 72.7%, Bybit 69.2%, OKX 68.0%, Gate 64.4%. But active taker flow disagrees — Binance's taker volume ran only 44.0% long against 56.0% short (a 0.79 ratio), OKX split almost dead even at 48.9/51.1, and only Gate's taker flow stayed net long at 54.4/45.6. That's the classic setup where the account count is long but the flow that actually pushes price is not. It already broke both ways today: over the past four hours, short liquidations ($9.73M) outran longs ($4.30M) as price bounced, yet the fuller 24h tally still shows longs absorbing more damage — $54.89M versus $44.47M of the $99.37M total across 6,782 forced closes. The two largest single fills bracket the range: an $8.18M short liquidated on Binance at $2,433.71, against $5.89M and $2.78M of longs wiped out near $2,357-$2,361 — the de facto pain band price has been oscillating inside all day.
News context: The Block reported that Zama is expanding its confidential Morpho lending lineup after an initial vault surpassed $40 million, and has now rolled out private swap functionality on Ethereum.
Verdict: With open interest parked near $23.70B and price at $2,392.72 sitting almost exactly between the $2,357 long-liquidation shelf and the $2,434 short-liquidation ceiling, the crowd-long/taker-short divergence favors another probe toward $2,357 before any squeeze back toward $2,434. That call is invalidated if open interest pushes through $24B while Binance's taker ratio flips back above 1.0 (net long) — that combination would mark fresh long conviction rather than short-covering, clearing a path through $2,434 with squeeze risk reduced. Data as of 07:05 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.