SOL Basis Hits -22.2% Annualized Backwardation as Funding Turns Negative
Solana's Solana perpetual market has slipped into deep backwardation this week: SOL trades at $98.48, up 1.6% in 24 hours, while its spot-futures basis sits at -0.06% (-22.2% annualized). Open interest across the market is $4.20 billion, down 0.25% over the past day and 0.78% in the last hour, funding has turned negative on a blended basis, and $7.69 million was liquidated in 24 hours — a combination that points to hedging and basis unwinds rather than fresh leveraged conviction.
Backwardation Deepens While Funding Splits Across Venues
An annualized basis discount of -22.2% is one of the steepest SOL futures have carried recently, and the funding picture underneath it is split rather than uniform. Bitget funding sits at -0.0022% and Gate at -0.0027%, while Binance still prints a positive 0.0018%, OKX 0.0037% and Bybit 0.0026%. The blended average lands negative largely because of outliers — Coinex's funding is an extreme -0.75% — while Bitmex and WhiteBit both still pay longs 0.01%. That dispersion suggests the backwardation is coming from targeted hedging and arbitrage flows on specific venues rather than a market-wide bet against SOL.
Open Interest Holds Near $4.2B, But Gate Is Bucking the Pullback
Total open interest across 19 tracked venues is $4.20 billion. Binance leads with $790.6 million (18.8% share), followed by Gate at $667.7 million (15.9%) and Bybit at $574.5 million (13.7%); Bitget holds $426.5 million (10.2%) and OKX $255.0 million (6.1%). Gate stands out on direction, adding 4.6% to its book over the past day even as Bybit trimmed 0.4% and the market-wide total slipped 0.25% — a sign that fresh positioning, long or short, is concentrating on specific venues rather than fading everywhere at once.
Long-Heavy Accounts, Selling Takers, and a Short-Side Squeeze
Account positioning remains crowded long, with 70.9% of SOL accounts net long overall. The skew is sharpest on Bitget at 79.0%/21.0% long-short (a 3.76 long-short ratio), followed by Bybit at 73.8%/26.2% (2.82) and OKX at 68.9%/31.1% (2.22). Taker flow tells the opposite story: only 40.6% of aggressive volume is buy-side, with Binance's taker ratio at just 0.55 and Gate's at 0.65. That gap between long-heavy holders and sell-heavy takers shows up directly in the liquidation data — over the past hour, $121,100 of the $128,400 wiped out was short positions, and shorts still made up $224,900 of $325,500 liquidated over four hours. Over 24 hours the balance flips, with $4.10 million in longs liquidated against $3.59 million in shorts, as the largest single liquidations clustered between $95.20 and $98.97, including a $553,457 short flush at $98.97 and long liquidations of $395,982 and $291,428 near $95.94-$95.20.
News context: Decrypt reported that Solana treasury firm DeFi Dev Corp is rolling out a new $300 million facility to buy more SOL, adding a fresh spot-demand angle underneath the backwardated futures curve.
Verdict: -22.2% annualized backwardation, split-but-net-negative funding, and a 70.9%-long/40.6%-buy taker gap together describe a market where spot and hedging demand is outrunning leveraged futures conviction — supportive for price stability near current levels but not yet a leveraged breakout. That read changes if open interest reclaims $4.5 billion alongside blended funding flipping positive and the basis narrowing back toward flat, which would confirm new long leverage rather than hedging is driving the move; until then, the $95-$99 zone where the session's largest liquidations clustered stays the key battleground. Data as of 09:05 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.