Zama Open Interest Jumps 7.9% to $16.6M as Binance Holds 43% Share

Zama (Zama) open interest jumped 7.9% over the past 24 hours to $16.58 million, tracking a 4.2% rally in spot price to $0.05 as trading volume across derivatives venues surged 86.5% to $30.26 million. The open interest build is broad-based but heavily skewed toward one venue, and the underlying funding and liquidation data tell a more nuanced story than a straightforward leverage-driven squeeze.

Binance Anchors the OI Surge, Bitget and MEXC Add Fuel

Binance still dominates ZAMA futures, holding 43.0% of total open interest at $7.13 million after growing 7.9% in the past day — in line with the market-wide pace. Bitget's $2.50 million book (15.1% share) rose 10.7%, while Bybit's smaller $1.76 million position (10.6% share) posted the sharpest 24h gain among the top five venues at 12.8%. MEXC's $1.02 million in open interest (6.1% share) climbed 14.4%, the fastest expansion outside the long tail. At the extreme, Aster's open interest surged 42.5% in 24 hours, though its $74,373 position size keeps it at just 0.45% of the total — a sign of speculative interest building on smaller venues rather than a structural shift in where liquidity concentrates. OKX, by contrast, grew a modest 1.5% to $1.77 million (10.7% share), and Gate's book actually shrank 4.7% to $356,762, showing the surge is not uniform across exchanges.

Funding Stays Flat Despite the Leverage Build

What stands out most is that funding rates have not moved with the open interest surge. Every major venue in the dataset — Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, KuCoin, MEXC, Aster, Bitunix, LBank and WhiteBit — is quoting an identical 0.005% per-8h rate, equivalent to roughly 5.5% annualized. That is a low, uniform print for a token whose open interest just grew nearly 8% in a day, and it suggests the position build is not being driven by aggressive one-sided leverage chasing the rally. Positioning skew backs this up only mildly: account-based data shows 55.2% of accounts net long overall, with Binance's account split at 53.3% long versus 46.7% short (a 1.14 ratio), while taker flow is only slightly more aggressive at 56.9% long. None of these read as crowded extremes, leaving room for the OI trend to keep building without an immediate funding-driven unwind risk.

Liquidation Flow Flips From Long-Squeeze to Short-Squeeze

The clearest tell in the data is the shift in liquidation flow. Over the full 24 hours, long liquidations totaled $28,162 versus just $9,196 for shorts — a roughly 75/25 split across 37 forced closes that points to longs getting flushed out during an earlier dip. Narrow the window to the past 12 hours, though, and the picture reverses: short liquidations ($7,149) outweigh long liquidations ($689) by close to 10 to 1 across 8 events. That flip is consistent with price grinding higher into the current session, squeezing the shorts who survived the earlier drawdown, while the 1h and 4h windows show zero forced closes — meaning the immediate squeeze pressure has already cooled rather than accelerating.

News context: The Daily Hodl reported that Zama rolled out tools letting users tap into established DeFi yield platforms while keeping their positions confidential, expanding the token's utility narrative beyond speculative trading.

Verdict: the level to watch is $16.5 million in total open interest — a slip back below that mark alongside price falling under $0.048 would mark the end of the short-squeeze and put recent gains at risk of reversing. As long as open interest holds above $16.5 million and funding stays pinned near 0.005% rather than spiking, the setup favors a continued low-leverage grind higher rather than a crowded blow-off top. A jump in funding above roughly 0.01% per 8h paired with a renewed spike in short liquidations would signal the squeeze has turned into genuine FOMO leverage — the point at which this thesis should be revisited. Data as of 08:25 Beijing time on Sep 18, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.