Zcash Shorts Lose $60M as Funding Stays Negative Despite 14.5% Rally

Zcash has ripped 14.5% higher to $1,359.93 while open interest jumped 40.9% in 24 hours to $2.89B - the kind of move that normally pushes funding rates deeply positive as leveraged longs pile on. Instead, ZEC's average funding rate sits at -0.034% per 8 hours, meaning short sellers are paying longs to stay in the trade even as price runs away from them.

Shorts Keep Adding Into the Rally

The negative print isn't isolated to one venue. Binance, the largest ZEC futures market with $760.5M in open interest (26.3% of the $2.89B tracked across 18 exchanges, +31.9% in 24h), is charging -0.022% funding. Bitget (-0.045%), Kucoin (-0.037%) and Gate (-0.018%) are all paying shorts as well, while Bybit is the lone major venue running positive funding at +0.005%. Coinex's -0.574% print is a thin-book outlier rather than a market signal. Aster, the smallest tracked venue, saw open interest balloon 117.0% in a day to $23.7M while still running -0.039% funding - fresh leverage is entering short, not long, into a rising market.

News context: CryptoPotato reported that a large trader had opened sizable short positions across Bitcoin, Ethereum and ZEC, positioning for a potential pullback tied to upcoming regulatory developments.

The Squeeze Has Already Cost Shorts $60M

That short-side stubbornness shows up directly in the liquidation data. Over the past 24 hours, $68.25M in ZEC positions were force closed, and $60.28M of that - 88% of the total - came from short sellers, against just $7.97M in long liquidations. The single largest print was a $7.08M short liquidation on Hyperliquid, one of four Hyperliquid shorts worth $13.2M combined within minutes of each other. The 12-hour window shows the same lean, with $7.22M in short liquidations versus $3.18M in longs. But the most recent hour flips the script: $105.1K in longs were wiped out against just $48.8K in shorts, a sign the squeeze is now colliding with a short-term pullback that is catching late longs offside.

Positioning Says Short, Flow Says Something Else

Account-level long/short data shows the crowd is still structurally bearish: only 31.1% of accounts are net long ZEC overall, and on Binance just 27.7% of accounts are long against 72.3% short (OKX is even more skewed at 24.8%/75.2%, Gate at 23.6%/76.4%). Yet aggregate taker flow tells a different story - 44.3% of taker volume is buy-side, and on Binance specifically, taker flow is actually net long at 51.8% versus 48.2% sell, the reverse of the account-level skew. OKX's taker split is nearly even at 49.9%/50.1% against a 24.8% long account base. That gap between passive positioning and aggressive execution is exactly the fuel a short squeeze needs to keep running.

The verdict: as long as ZEC holds above the ~$1,300 zone that framed the past hour's long liquidations, and funding on Binance, Bitget and Kucoin stays negative while short liquidations keep outpacing longs, this reads as an unfinished squeeze rather than a blow-off top - RSI readings of 66.3 (1h), 73.7 (4h) and 69.3 (1d) leave room for one more leg before momentum truly overheats. The setup is invalidated if funding flips positive across Binance, Bitget and Gate at the same time that long liquidations overtake shorts on a 4-hour basis - that combination would mark the point where trapped shorts have been fully flushed and the trade becomes ordinary momentum-chasing rather than a squeeze. Data as of 15:13 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.