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Twelve crypto went up and added contracts as they went. That's a chased rally.

Six went up while shedding contracts. That's a squeeze.

BTC, so far, has risen 44% and has 3% fewer contracts than it started with. Shorts are 64% of the liquidations so far. Funding averaged 4.9% annualized and went negative on two days out of eighty-six. Nobody paid to be long, and everyone who paid to be short got exactly what they paid for.

ETH has been up as much as 71% with contracts up 3%, which puts them at 93% of the all-time record while the price sits at 56% of its own. It's trading at the same price as September 2024 with more than double the contracts open. Sixty percent of its liquidations were shorts.

SOL rose 59% on 10% fewer contracts, funding at 3.1%, negative one day in five. The shorts hung around SOL like the last guy at a wake, and they got handed the bill.

ADA belongs here on shape if not on size. It built 54% more contracts in Q2 while the price fell, then shed 10% of them in Q3 while the price rose 72%. 🤷

UNI rose 230% and added 53% more contracts, the most of any ticker we’re looking at today, with funding at 6.4% and liquidations running 2.7 times its Q2 total. Its heaviest liquidation day was August 22, and it was the longs getting hit.

NEAR rose 158% and added 43%, putting its contract count at 94% of record. Same date (22nd) for its heaviest liquidation day, same side. It printed its fourth-largest long liquidation day ever on Tuesday and the count has been sliding since.

XLM added 42% more contracts in Q2, another 21% in Q3, and posted a 15% gain that ranks second-worst of the eighteen. Three-quarters of its liquidations were longs. The most patient money in crypto, in the sense that a man standing in a field waiting for a bus is patient.

SUI has contracts at 96% of record and a price at a fifth of its high. Seventy percent of liquidations were longs.

XRP is the most shorted major by funding, negative 22% of days, and the only one whose liquidation rate ran at its trailing-year pace. It churned all quarter and went nowhere in the last month.

DOGE, AVAX and LTC are milder versions, long share in the sixties, contracts up 9% to 32%. Litecoin at least collected the squeeze it was owed on Thursday, up 16% with shorts liquidated.

ZEC rose 287% on fewer contracts, with shorts taking two-thirds of the liquidations and the highest daily liquidation rate in the group. A squeeze that never stopped squeezing. September's funding averaged a fifth of baseline. Nobody's paying to be here. Everybody's here.

HYPE is the fourth-largest book of the eighteen at $3 billion, bigger than ZEC or XRP, price at 95% of its high, and the derivatives are asleep. Near a record with the least leverage in a year.

XMR rose 86% with funding at 14% annualized, 22% over the last week, the only hot carry on the list, and almost nobody getting liquidated. Longs are paying the rent on a storage unit for a bicycle.

BNB is the least stretched of the bunch and boring.

TRX has funding negative on 64% of days, contracts at 27% of record, and its heaviest liquidation day all quarter cleared 0.6% of open interest. There is no derivatives market here.

The 19th was the majors' short squeeze. 90% of Bitcoin's four-day liquidations were shorts, 80% of Ethereum's.

The 22nd was the alt purge. Sixty-eight percent of Uniswap's were longs, 61% of NEAR's. The line between squeezed and purged runs almost exactly along market cap.

Ten of the eighteen had their heaviest liquidation day of the quarter on the 22nd. Five had it on the 19th. For most of this list, the defining event of Q3 was longs getting flushed on a flat day.

ZEC and XRP each lost about 17% of their open interest in those four sessions. Barn fire.

Litecoin's heaviest liquidation day of the quarter was Thursday, and it was a good day if you were long: up 16%, with the shorts doing the getting-liquidated. Monero had its own version on September 18, up 9%.

Bitcoin's contract count is down three sessions running, 384,000 to 355,000, with price off about 3%.

Funding over the last seven days is above the quarterly average for sixteen of the eighteen. The carry is turning up from a low base.

The four biggest winners, ZEC, UNI, NEAR and AVAX, are four of the five least correlated to Bitcoin over the last month, and the fifth is Tron.