Ondo Derivatives: $5.3M Liquidations Tilt Short as OI Climbs 7.0%
Ondo is trading at $0.5527 after a 6.0% rise, but the more important derivatives signal is the combination of $522.5M in open interest and $5.3M in 24-hour liquidations. Open interest is up 7.0% over the same period, so the move has attracted fresh leverage rather than simply closing old positions. The liquidation balance leans toward shorts, yet the positioning data shows that the market is not uniformly bullish.
Recent market coverage has connected ONDO strength with a rise in US Treasury yields, adding a macro backdrop to the token’s advance.
OI concentration is split across venues
The exchange distribution makes the build-up more fragile than the headline total suggests. Binance holds $99.6M, or 19.1% of tracked open interest, but its position has declined 3.5% in 24 hours. Bybit is close behind at $97.3M and 18.6% of the total, with its OI expanding 9.1%. Gate controls $61.3M, or 11.7%, and has posted the sharpest major-venue increase at 23.4%. OKX is smaller at $25.1M, representing 4.8%, and is up 0.5% over the day.
This is a meaningful liquidation-skew setup: the largest declining book is Binance, while the strongest expansion is taking place on Gate and Bybit. The 4-hour changes reinforce that split. Gate OI is up 6.4%, Bitget is up 2.9%, and Bybit is up 0.6%, while Binance is down 0.4% and OKX is down 2.4%. Leverage is therefore migrating rather than expanding evenly across the market.
Funding is positive, but flow is not one-sided
The current funding rate is positive on most major venues at 0.005%, including Binance, Bybit, Bitget and Gate. OKX is slightly lower at 0.004531%, while Coinbase is at 0.0019% and Hyperliquid at 0.00125%. Kraken is the exception at -0.000417%, showing that the long-carry bias is broad but not universal.
There are also sharp venue-specific outliers. CoinEx shows 0.573328%, although its ONDO OI is only $67.1K, so that rate is not representative of the main market. Lighter is at 0.0312%, while dYdX is at 0.018949%. The broad conclusion is that longs are paying to remain positioned, but the cost is moderate on the deepest books. That leaves room for further upside squeezes without proving that the entire move is overcrowded.
Liquidations favor shorts, while takers hedge
The liquidation windows show the clearest directional imbalance. Over four hours, $337.6K of shorts were liquidated against $72.0K of longs. Over twelve hours, short liquidations reached $495.6K versus $697.8K for longs, so the balance briefly reversed across the wider window. Over 24 hours, however, shorts again led at $3.1M against $2.2M for longs, for a total of $5.3M.
The largest recorded short liquidation was $129.8K near $0.5654, followed by a $100.1K short liquidation near $0.5560. Long liquidations also appeared near $0.5546, $0.5494 and $0.5374. These levels form a practical map: upside through $0.5654 could force more short covering, while a retreat toward $0.5374 would expose the lower long-liquidation zone.
The long/short ratio adds a second layer of tension. Accounts are long-heavy on Binance at 63.9% and especially on Bybit at 73.7%, while Bitget reaches 82.1%. Yet taker flow is less optimistic: Binance takers are only 53.6% long, and Gate takers are 84.9% short. In other words, passive account positioning favors longs, but active execution is willing to sell into the move. That divergence helps explain why shorts can still be liquidated even as fresh short orders continue to appear.
Verdict
ONDO has a near-term squeeze bias while price holds above $0.5527 and open interest remains near or above $522.5M. A push through the $0.5654 liquidation level would strengthen the short-covering case; the view is invalidated if price loses $0.5374 while OI stays above $522.5M, because that would point to trapped longs rather than a controlled squeeze. Data as of 08:26 Beijing time on Sep 26, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.