NEAR Open Interest Jumps 41.9% to $915M as Price Rallies 28.6% Past $3.50
NEAR Protocol has surged 28.6% over the past 24 hours to $3.50, dragging open interest up 41.9% to $914.9M and turning NEAR Protocol into one of the most aggressively re-leveraged mid-cap perpetual markets on the board. Trading volume followed, jumping 126.5% to $2.27B, while RSI readings of 79.0 (1h), 88.5 (4h) and 80.9 (1d) all sit deep in overbought territory — a setup that usually means the rally is being carried by fresh open interest rather than pure spot demand.
News context: crypto.news reported that NEAR's confidential-computing TVL topped $70 million, triggering the project's first incentive distribution.
Open Interest Concentrates on Binance and Bybit
Across 19 tracked venues, NEAR's aggregate open interest sits at $914.9M, but growth is uneven. Binance leads with $188.9M (20.6% share) after adding 48.6% in 24 hours, and Bybit follows closely with $180.7M (19.75% share, +33.5%) — together the two venues now hold roughly 40% of all outstanding contracts. OKX ($48.7M, +36.2% 24h) and Bitget ($58.4M, +31.8% 24h) show similar 24-hour growth but flat-to-negative 4-hour changes (OKX -0.3%, Bitget -0.7%), suggesting the newest leverage is landing on Binance and Bybit while positioning on the mid-tier exchanges has already started to plateau. Gate is the outlier on short-term momentum, up 6.3% in the last four hours versus a 42.7% 24-hour gain, hinting that smaller venues are still catching up to the move.
A Short Squeeze Wrote This Rally
The liquidation data makes the mechanics explicit. Over 24 hours, $11.37M of short positions were force-closed against just $1.47M of longs — roughly a 7.7:1 imbalance — and the pain accelerated the longer the window: the 12-hour bucket alone accounts for $8.51M of short liquidations out of $9.5M total. The five largest single liquidations were all shorts, clustered between $3.18 and $3.43: a $992K short wipeout on Hyperliquid at $3.2136, a $706K short on OKX at $3.432, and two Binance shorts worth a combined $402K near $3.18 and $3.32. That $3.18-$3.43 band is now the scar tissue of the squeeze — the exact zone where trapped shorts capitulated. Notably, the most recent 1-hour window looks far calmer, with longs and shorts liquidated almost evenly ($40.5K vs $33.4K), suggesting the acute phase of the squeeze has already passed.
Positioning Is Starting to Diverge
Account-level data still leans long — 57.9% of NEAR accounts are net long overall, with Binance the most skewed at 61.3% long and Bybit at 57.2% — but the long/short ratio on aggressive taker flow tells a different story: taker volume is only 44.3% long market-wide, and on Binance specifically taker flow is 56.3% short even though its account base is the most bullish of any venue. Gate shows the same split most sharply, with takers just 32.4% long against 67.6% short. Funding rates are mixed too: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget and Gate are all pinned at the 0.01% cap, but smaller venues are running far hotter — Lighter at 0.0864% and CoinEx at 0.0739% — while EdgeX funding has gone negative at -0.005%. Layered on top, the perpetual basis has actually turned negative at -0.14% (-52.0% annualized), meaning futures are trading at a discount to spot even as price rips higher — a sign the rally has been driven more by spot buying and short covering than by fresh derivatives-led bullish conviction.
The setup favors continuation as long as NEAR holds above the $3.18-$3.43 liquidation band and aggregate open interest stays above $900M — both would confirm the squeeze structure is still intact rather than reversing. The view breaks down if price closes back below $3.18 while OI slips under $800M and taker long share falls further below 40%, which would signal the squeeze has fully unwound and fresh shorts are back in control. Data as of 16:05 Beijing time on Sep 18, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.