Zcash: $14.7M Liquidations Reveal a Heavy Long-Side Skew
Zcash is trading at $1,316.84 while $14.7M in positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, including $10.5M of longs versus $4.2M of shorts. At the same time, aggregate open interest has fallen 2.6% to roughly $2.60B. That combination—long-heavy forced selling and shrinking leverage—sets a distinctly defensive tone for ZEC derivatives, even though not every venue is positioned the same way.
Recent coverage has focused on Zcash’s market momentum, easing ETF flows, mining investment, protocol development and a new European-traded product.
Open interest is concentrated, but broadly retreating
Binance remains the largest reported venue with $610.6M of ZEC open interest, or 23.5% of the total, after a 5.2% 24-hour decline. Gate follows with $291.7M and an 11.2% share, but its exposure has contracted 7.7%, the sharpest retreat among the major books. Bybit holds $244.5M, or 9.4%, and is the only large venue in this group with a small daily increase of 0.4%. OKX contributes $158.6M, or 6.1%, after a 2.2% decrease.
The important signal is not simply the size of the books, but the direction of risk. Binance and Gate together represent a large portion of visible exposure and both are reducing it, while Bybit’s modest increase has not prevented its open interest from falling 4.1% over the latest four-hour window. This looks more like deleveraging after pressure on longs than a clean build-up of fresh bullish risk.
Funding is positive, but the spread is uneven
The aggregate funding rate is positive at 0.0% when rounded to one decimal place, indicating that longs are still paying across much of the market. The venue dispersion matters: Binance is at 0.0%, Bybit, Gate, Bitget and BitMEX are also at 0.0% on the same display basis, while CoinEx stands out at 0.2%. Kraken is slightly negative at -0.0%, and several venues sit near 0.0%.
This is not a broad, aggressive funding premium; it is a fragmented cost of holding longs. The high CoinEx reading is especially notable because it contrasts with the broader low-rate backdrop. In practical terms, the market is not uniformly crowded, but buyers are still paying to maintain exposure while the largest liquidation flow is already coming from the long side.
Liquidation flow confirms the downside imbalance
The liquidation windows show the skew becoming more severe as the observation period expands. In the latest hour, $89.6K of longs were liquidated against only $578.2K of shorts. Over four hours, long liquidations reached $8.1M versus $394.5K for shorts. The twelve-hour split was $8.6M versus $916.8K, and the 24-hour total widened to $10.5M of longs against $4.2M of shorts.
The largest recorded event was a $1.3M OKX long liquidation at $1,311.76, close to the current market price. Other large long liquidations appeared at $1,302.30 and $1,285.48, while the largest listed short liquidation was $197.2K at $1,378.35. That asymmetry places the immediate risk below the market, where another break could force additional long exits.
Positioning data adds a useful contradiction. The overall long/short ratio shows 50.6% of accounts long, while active takers are 54.7% long. Yet Binance accounts are 43.4% long, compared with 61.1% on Bybit, and Gate takers are 68.2% long even though Gate accounts are only 47.5% long. Passive account positioning is therefore mixed, but aggressive flow is leaning into longs on selected venues—a setup that can amplify downside if support fails.
Verdict
The liquidation skew remains bearish while ZEC trades at $1,316.84, especially with open interest near $2.60B and the key downside liquidation markers at $1,311.76 and $1,285.48. The view would be invalidated if price reclaims $1,378.35 while open interest rebuilds above $2.60B; that would show shorts being forced out and new leverage returning rather than longs continuing to unwind. Data as of 13:05 Beijing time on Oct 7, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.