THORChain RUNE Open Interest Falls 13.1% as Leverage Resets

THORChain’s RUNE derivatives market is showing a clear leverage reset: aggregate open interest has dropped 13.1% in 24 hours to about $22.2M, while the token trades at $0.743 after a 1.4% daily decline. The purge is not uniform across venues, however. The largest contracts are beginning to rebuild over the latest four-hour window even as their broader 24-hour positioning remains lower.

Leverage has been cut at the leaders

Binance holds the largest share of RUNE open interest at $6.7M, or 30.1% of the tracked total. Its position is down 11.5% over 24 hours, but has already risen 5.9% over four hours. Bybit carries $4.3M, representing 19.2%, with an 8.5% daily reduction and only a 0.9% four-hour recovery. Bitget is smaller at $1.8M and 7.9% of the market; its 24-hour decline is just 1.4%, while four-hour open interest is up 2.3%.

That distribution matters for the open interest purge thesis. Binance and Bybit together still represent nearly half of tracked exposure, so their daily contraction is more meaningful than the modest increase at Gate, where open interest is $809.2K, or 3.6%, and has risen 2.6% over 24 hours. The latest rebound at the dominant venues looks more like partial re-leveraging after forced exits than a confirmed trend reversal.

Funding is split, not decisively bullish

The funding rate map reinforces that the market is divided. Binance is marginally negative at -0.0%, while Bitget and Bybit are both positive at 0.0% after rounding to one decimal place. Gate stands out on the negative side at -0.1%, whereas Kraken is positive at 0.0%. Other venues are also mostly positive, including Coinbase at 0.0% and CoinEx at 0.0%.

In practical terms, the funding signal is not broad enough to confirm a clean long rebuild. The negative readings at Binance and Gate suggest that some short exposure is paying carry, while positive readings at Bitget and Bybit show that longs are still willing to pay on important venues. The reported average funding rate is negative, but its small magnitude means the more important signal is the cross-venue disagreement rather than an aggressive directional premium.

Liquidations show the long flush already happened

The liquidation structure is the clearest evidence of the purge. In the latest hour, only $4.0K of positions were liquidated, all from shorts. Over four hours, long liquidations reached $5.5K versus $6.7K for shorts, suggesting the immediate tape has started to punish both sides. The twelve-hour window is different: $35.0K of longs were wiped out against $14.9K of shorts.

Across 24 hours, long liquidations total $89.8K, more than three times the $29.1K in short liquidations, for $118.9K overall. This is a classic long-side deleveraging footprint rather than a fresh short cascade. The shift toward short liquidations in the shorter windows warns that late sellers may now be vulnerable if RUNE stabilizes, but the cumulative damage still sits firmly on the long side.

Positioning adds another layer of tension. Binance accounts are 63.2% long and 36.8% short, while the reported taker-long reading is much higher at 86.9%. That gap says active buying has been substantially more aggressive than the broader account balance. It can support a rebound, but after a 13.1% open-interest contraction, it also raises the risk that new longs are entering before the market has fully absorbed the deleveraging.

Verdict: The exclusive read is a long-purge market with rebound risk, not yet a confirmed bullish reversal. The key reference is $0.743 against roughly $22.2M of aggregate open interest: a recovery through $0.743 while OI rebuilds above $22.2M would invalidate the purge-first view and signal that leverage is returning with price confirmation. Until then, the dominant evidence remains the 24-hour long-liquidation imbalance and the decline in Binance and Bybit exposure. Data as of 01:05 Beijing time on Sep 29, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.