Ether Futures See Unusually High Liquidations as Funding Rates Point to Bearish Sentiment

Futures tracking ether (ETH) have racked up almost $140 million in liquidations over the past 24 hours with a key metric suggesting traders are turning bearish on the asset’s near-term growth as they focus their attention on the contracts before Ethereum’s Merge next month.

Liquidations occur when an exchange forces a trader’s leveraged position to close because of a partial or total loss of margin, or funds set aside to keep the trade open.

According to Coinglass data, liquidations on bitcoin futures hovered at $54 million over the same period, with other major cryptocurrencies, such as solana and avalanche, seeing just over $3 million. Bitcoin futures usually have the highest liquidations in the futures markets owing to their popularity and liquidity.

Ether’s recent popularity suggests there’s currently higher interest for that market in the absence of a notable catalyst for bitcoin. In the past month, weekly trading volumes on spot ether have surpassed those of spot bitcoin for the first time, data from research firm Kaiko show.

Negative funding rates, however, may also indicate that traders are hedging their spot ether holdings by shorting the asset using futures. This allows traders to protect losses in case ether prices fall while receiving the proposed ether proof-of-work tokens (ETHPOW) at the time of the Merge. But rates have turned and remained negative for over two weeks, suggesting higher demand from traders to remain short on ether contracts.

Some traders say broader equity markets have more of an impact on ether prices than technical catalysts like the Merge.

“Looking at the charts of both ether and Nasdaq 100, one gets the impression that there may be a strong correlation between the two contracts since the beginning of the year,” Daniel Kostecki, director at financial services firm Conotoxia, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. He noted that poor sentiment in traditional equity markets may be driving prices of ether more than “the anticipation of the Merge.”

“It seems that it may now be difficult for both ether and other cryptocurrencies to break this correlation,” Kostecki said.

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