Shiba Inu Open Interest Hits $48.6M as CoinEx Purges 47.6% of Shorts

Shiba Inu is trading near $0.00000507, up 4.8% over the past 24 hours, and aggregate open interest in SHIB derivatives has climbed to $48,578,110, up 1.2% on the day. That headline stability hides a sharp split beneath the surface: one major exchange just purged nearly half of its book in a single day, funding on that venue has collapsed into deeply negative territory, and the composition of liquidations has flipped from long-heavy to short-only within the last few hours.

CoinEx's Book Empties While Bitget and Kraken Add

Across the 11 exchanges tracked, total open interest sits at $48,512,844, up 1.2% in 24 hours. Bitget carries the largest single share at $8,703,766 (17.9% of the market) and is essentially flat, up just 0.3% on the day. OKX holds $5,646,058 (11.6% share) but is down 1.8% in 24 hours and 0.5% in the last four hours, while Gate's $5,358,576 book (11.1% share) is down 0.7% on the day yet already rebuilding, up 0.7% in the last four hours. Kraken is a smaller player at $1,024,330 (2.1% share) but is growing the fastest of the group, up 6.4% in 24 hours and 1.4% in the last four. CoinEx stands out for the opposite reason: its book, just 0.4% of tracked open interest at $183,655, has been gutted — down 47.6% in 24 hours and 15.9% in just the last four hours, the sharpest purge of any venue in the dataset.

Funding Shows the Purge Was a Short Squeeze

The funding rate data explains why. CoinEx's current rate is -0.530716%, dramatically negative next to the rest of the market: OKX, Bitget, Gate, Kucoin, Lbank, Mexc and Bitmex all sit near a flat 0.01%, Cryptocom is at 0.01428%, Bitfinex at 0.02263%, Kraken at 0.00377%, Whitebit at 0.00355% and dYdX at exactly 0%. A rate that negative means CoinEx shorts were paying longs a premium more than 50 times steeper than anywhere else on the list — the textbook signature of an exchange-specific short squeeze, and a plausible driver of the rapid unwind in that venue's open interest.

Liquidations Flip From Long-Heavy to Short-Only

The liquidation tally over the past 24 hours totals $168,846 across 63 events, and longs made up $139,879 of that, or 82.8% of the total, versus $28,966 in shorts. But the mix inverted as the day went on: the trailing 12-hour window already leaned short ($17,125 versus $3,607 long), and both the 4-hour ($7,950) and 1-hour ($7,571) windows were 100% short-side, with zero long liquidations recorded in either. That timeline lines up with the CoinEx funding collapse and the 4.8% price rally — broad long liquidations earlier in the session gave way to a short squeeze as price recovered. Positioning adds a wrinkle: 68.1% of accounts are net long, well above the 58.2% long share of recent taker volume, meaning the account base is more one-sidedly bullish than the market's most recent order flow.

News context: CryptoPotato and U.Today reported that Shibarium rolled out a technical update this week, refreshing its RPC endpoint in the Ethereum registry.

With price at $0.00000507 and total open interest at $48.6M, the short-squeeze read holds as long as CoinEx funding stays negative and the 1h/4h liquidation windows keep skewing short. The signal that would flip this thesis: total open interest slipping back under $48M while the short-side liquidation share in the 1h/4h windows reverts to long-heavy — that combination would mean the squeeze has run its course and fresh long unwinding is taking over instead. Data as of 20:19 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.