Solana Slips Under $100 but Open Interest Rises 1.5% — Someone Is Buying This Dip
Solana lost the $100 handle, trading at $97.01 after a 2.0% daily decline — and its futures market responded by adding exposure. Open interest across major venues rose 1.5% to about $4.3 billion over the same 24 hours. Position-building into a falling price means conviction is rising on at least one side of the tape, and the funding board suggests it is both.
News context: Cointelegraph reported that Solana's latest mainnet upgrade more than tripled the transaction size limit to 4,096 bytes, a technical catalyst that landed into a soft market.
The build is broad, the funding is split
Binance grew its SOL book 1.8% to $786 million (18.4% share), Bybit added 1.3% to $582 million and Gate 0.5% to $646 million, while Bitget trimmed 1.5% and OKX 0.9% — a net add concentrated on the largest venues. Funding, meanwhile, has fractured: 8 of 23 tracked venues are negative, including OKX (-0.0031%), Bitget (-0.0083%), Gate (-0.0054%) and Bybit (-0.0015%) per 8 hours, while Binance holds positive at 0.0017%. Rising OI with mixed-sign funding is the signature of a two-sided battle — new shorts pressing the sub-$100 break, new longs buying the upgrade story.
The liquidation and aggression data lean one way
The forced-flow tape is unambiguous about who has been losing: $18.2 million of the day's $20.1 million in SOL liquidations came from longs, with the largest single prints at $98.74 and $98.53 on OKX and $95.92 on Binance. Aggression is also sell-heavy — Binance takers are only 29.7% buyers, among the weakest buy-side readings for any major asset today, and OKX sits at 43.9%. Account positioning stays stubbornly long at 72.0%, rising to 79.7% on Bitget. Longs are crowded, paying the liquidation bill, and being sold into on the tape.
The verdict on the sub-$100 regime
Our read: the OI build makes this different from a simple bleed — it is an active contest, and the $95.92 Binance liquidation print marks the bottom of the contested zone. As long as SOL holds above $95.9, negative funding on eight venues is effectively a subsidy for dip-buyers, and a reclaim of $100 would force the freshest shorts to cover into thin resistance up to $103. A close below $95.9 flips the script: the 72% long cohort becomes fuel, and with the 4-hour RSI at 37.0 not yet washed out, the next liquidation shelf would form in the low $90s. The tell to watch is Binance taker flow — a recovery from 29.7% toward 50% buy share would say the aggressive sellers are finished.
Data as of 19:05 Beijing time on Sept 16, covering Binance, Bybit, Gate, Bitget, OKX and other major exchanges.