PIZZA看加密

The US stock market hasn’t opened yet, but storage chip stocks have already been bought up. This weekend, the U.S.-stock capital on Binance almost only took one direction: SanDisk, Micron, Western Digital, and Hynix all surged across the board, while the broader market didn’t move along. Before Monday’s open, someone specifically added to positions in storage.

Counting from the Friday U.S. stock close, $SNDKB is up 8.6%, leading the sector; $MUB has broken through the $1,000 level, and the tokenized versions of Western Digital and the storage-theme ETFs have also each risen by nearly 5 points. SanDisk traded over $43 million in volume over the weekend, surpassing SpaceX to rank first among all bStocks; meanwhile, $SPYB just went sideways. These orders are essentially betting on one thing: storage stocks will gap up on Monday.

To understand this bet, you need to look back at how wild this sector has been over the past month or so.

This year, storage has been the most frenzied line in the AI trade. Data centers’ appetite for memory is growing faster than capacity can. Prices have been soaring nonstop, and JPMorgan even coined a term for this phenomenon: chipflation. The DRAM market rose by 30% quarter-over-quarter for two straight quarters. Samsung itself has said that the supply shortage could last until 2028. Micron has gained more than two times within the year, and at one point it was the most crowded long trade in all U.S. stocks.

SanDisk’s position in this cycle is somewhat special. It’s a pure-play flash memory maker. In the first half of the AI rally, HBM and DRAM were the focus, so money flooded into Micron and Hynix, leaving flash as the “lagging second.” Then the shift happened this year: data centers started stacking enterprise SSDs for AI training and inference, and a flash shortage also emerged. SanDisk, once considered a latecomer, squeezed its way from catch-up mode to become a leader. And again this weekend, it is the one charging at the front. The supply side also helped: during the prior down-cycle, flash makers cut capital expenditures to the bone. New capacity ramps up over years, so when demand suddenly turned strong, the shortfall proved harder to fill than people expected.

At the end of July, this line hit the brakes hard. The market feared the cycle was topping. Micron, Hynix, and SanDisk all fell more than 20% from their highs, slipping into a technical bear market, and calls for the overall AI trade to pull back briefly took the lead. But after the dump, only a few days passed—SanDisk rebounded 26% in a single day, leaving the shorts who rushed to chase downside hanging in midair.

On August 13, an investor day reignited the rally. SanDisk management laid out growth models for fiscal years 2028 to 2030: revenue would maintain an annual growth rate in the high single digits to low double digits; gross margin targets were drawn straight around the 80% range; and any excess cash would be returned to shareholders. The stock jumped another 14% that day. The old playbook for memory stocks is that manufacturers go on a wild expansion spree at the peak of the cycle, then crush prices, and investors have taken enough losses from that pattern over decades. This guidance is management signaling in plain sight: no expansion this time—divide out the money. The aggressive buying on Binance this weekend is buying into the continuation of that message.

The disagreement between bulls and bears is sizable right now. The bulls have already laid out their case: the shortage is real, capacity can’t be expanded in the near term, and the manufacturers have set rules for themselves this time. The bears also carry weight. BTIG’s Klynski warned that this AI pullback might not be over yet. Another, more specific sell-side view: memory prices will peak within the next two quarters. If it really gets there, then Micron’s low-looking P/E—because it appears cheap—would actually be a trap; in a cycle stock, when profits are at the top, valuations often look the lowest. Over the past several decades, this industry’s script has indeed always been the same: shortage, price hikes, expansion, oversupply, collapse—no round without exception.

I’m on the bull side, but only about half a step. The mid-term logic is supported by real data—supply gaps and manufacturer discipline. But after Micron has doubled and doubled again within a year, volatility at this spot can only get worse. The kind of “clean-out” at the end of July—where it dropped 20% in half a month—would likely come again. The weekend’s upside also deserves an extra discount: it ran up from a smaller-cap venue on Binance, where depth is limited, and sentiment readings are more reliable than pricing reads. Put together, this feels more like a holder’s market: if you already have inventory, keep holding; chasing from flat cash now means you’re taking the risk of that top-of-cycle tug-of-war. When it’s my turn to act, I won’t chase Monday’s gap up. At this level, patience is worth more than speed. I’ve also written down the conditions for admitting I’m wrong in advance: DRAM or NAND spot prices turn from month-over-month increase to month-over-month decline, or if any major maker’s capex comes in above expectations—then the whole logic is void.

No need to wait too long to verify. Monday night’s U.S. market open will determine whether SanDisk’s gap-up magnitude matches the 8.6% move that the Binance weekend board delivered—these bids will be proven right away as either a head start or an overshoot. And there are two more tests ahead: Nvidia’s earnings report next week, and the Jackson Hole meeting at the end of the month. Once Nvidia clarifies its capex guidance, the order expectations for HBM and enterprise SSDs will find footing. At Jackson Hole, what the market wants to confirm is whether the rate-cut path will still keep growth stocks in the game. If you’re holding storage positions, you can mark these two dates on your calendar.

Last Friday, two institutions that control tens of trillions of dollars together added to the same stock. Vanguard added $MSTR to $3.1 billion, up 13% from the previous quarter. In one go, Invesco added more than 40%, bringing it to $860 million. Around the same time, the longtime bear Peter Schiff urged everyone to sell Bitcoin along with this company.

It’s the same one: Michael Saylor’s Strategy—formerly MicroStrategy. Its tokenized stock on Binance, $MSTRB , is now trading at just over $94, and over the weekend with U.S. markets closed, it basically didn’t move.

What this company does can be summed up in one sentence: borrow money, issue shares, and then convert almost all that money into $BTC to hold—effectively a leveraged Bitcoin position. The most valuable part of what it held in the past wasn’t actually the coins. It was the premium the market was willing to pay on top. At its most extreme, its market cap could reach 1.4 times the net value of the Bitcoin it held—that was the number in May. When you buy it, you’re buying Bitcoin plus a portion of market sentiment.

That premium is now being worn down. Institutions that track companies like this have estimated that the multiple has already been squeezed down to just above 1, essentially trading close to net asset value. The market’s pricing for Strategy now is roughly what its 840,000 Bitcoin holdings are worth—meaning the extra “faith” premium isn’t being priced in anymore.

Saylor’s own actions tell the story even more clearly. He has been selling Bitcoin for two straight weeks. His most recent sale was 1,690 coins, at an average price of a bit over $64,000, while his original cost basis when he built the position was $75,000 per coin—he sold at a loss. The money from selling coins isn’t being used to buy the dip. It’s for repurchasing a preferred stock called STRC, which will later support interest payments to be issued. The “buy and never sell” line he’s repeated for years—he’s loosened that himself.

My view is pretty direct: once the premium is pressed down to 1x, the significance of holding $MSTRB versus simply holding $BTC is cut by more than half. The premium is the real product of this stock. When the premium disappears, what you’re holding is dilution from issuing new shares—and potential passive selling pressure if it gets kicked out of the MSCI index—while getting only an exposure roughly equivalent to Bitcoin.

If Vanguard and Invesco are adding, I’m more inclined to read it as betting on a bottom around 1x that won’t get worse, rather than betting it will surge back to 1.4x.

If what you really want is Bitcoin exposure, at this level, holding Bitcoin directly is cleaner. The only exception is if you’re specifically betting that the premium will mean-revert—that’s a different bet, and it has little to do with Bitcoin itself.

Next Monday, there’s one thing to watch: whether Saylor continues selling Bitcoin to fund share buybacks. If he stops, it means the cash side has calmed down; if he keeps selling, then this machine effectively transitions from buying Bitcoin to supporting the share price. #MSTR #Bitcoin reserve

Binance’s biggest drop leaderboard: #2 $COW . In one day, it fell by 20%. It’s also currently sitting at #4 across the entire market for the most negative funding rate.

Put into plain language: the bears keep smashing the price downward. During the process, every four hours they have to pay longs. After the dump, they then say “good job for cooperating.”

It looks like charity, but in reality this is the most cost-effective deal of the past two days.

Before 4:00 PM on August 15, $COW was a zombie order book nobody was looking at—the price just bounced around 0.10 for five days. Then that single 4-hour candlestick directly pulled it from 0.1024 to 0.1649. Trading volume surged immediately and never stopped all day.

The rest doesn’t need guessing. After the peak, it slowly bled downward to a low of 0.1183. The current contract price is 0.1223, down 20% over the past 24 hours.

The timing of the funding rate is especially interesting. During the pump, the funding rate was still positive at +0.005%. Once the price hit its top, the next level instantly dropped to -1.9141%. After that, every subsequent settlement has been negative—previous level: -0.4496%, and now it’s set at -0.392%. The bears have been bleeding money all day.

In the same period, the price moved from 0.1480 to 0.1223. They paid a full day’s toll and got this whole move in return—money well spent, willingly.

At first, I thought the order book was too thin, causing the funding rate to float around. But the open interest numbers don’t support that. On the afternoon of August 15, open interest was only 10.75 million $COW . Now it’s 59.83 million—more than five times—and up to now it hasn’t rolled back. It’s still pinned near the top funding levels. The real distortion from a thin book is when the open interest is so small it’s basically negligible, and the funding rate goes haywire. Here, the position size is built up for real—none of it has left.

The tricky part is this: the long/short accounts are split around 0.9478. Of the accounts holding shorts, 51.34% are short accounts—four hours ago it was 50.12%. The price has already dropped by 20%, yet people are still crowding into shorts on the other side, paying the toll while they squeeze in.

Based on the current open interest of $7.33 million and a funding rate of -0.392%, during the midnight settlement tonight, the shorts will have to pay out about $29,000.

I won’t guess the direction. I only know that on the spot side for #COW , over the past 24 hours it has moved only $16.25 million. On the contract side, it’s several times that. Whose game it is has already been written all over the numbers.

The funding level at midnight is the only thing worth watching tonight. If the funding rate moves back toward zero, it means the first batch of shorts locked in profits and is leaving. If it gets pulled back to the -1% level again, then it’s a new batch queuing up to short from this position—and this level is already not far from the 0.10 from five days ago.

I’m betting the funding rate will return toward zero. If I get slapped in the face, I’ll admit it under this post tomorrow.

Four days ago, the short positions of $KAITO had to pay $1.03 million in rent

Today, for the same batch of positions, they paid $75,000

I bet on the wrong side for this trade

In the piece from August 12, I wrote that before the unlock, the shorts would not withdraw, and the funding rate would continue to go deeper. By August 20, it would be left with a smaller but tougher-looking bucket

The funding rate didn’t go deeper—it kept moving back toward recovery

Recently, the eight most relevant levels are -0.1204%, -0.0973%, -0.0975%, -0.0730%, -0.0587%, -0.0830%, -0.0761%, -0.0800%

From that single-day extreme of -1.2214%, it has converged by about 93%

For every $10,000 short, the daily rent dropped from $480 to $47

The position side also went the other way. Open positions rose from 34.757 million tokens to 44.39 million—an increase of nearly 10 million tokens in just over four days

I thought people were running out, but actually they were moving in

Where I was wrong, I figured out today: I treated an extreme as the starting point of a trend

Negative funding rates usually revert on their own. Arbitrage positions eat them up, and only a few can keep deepening all the way

What really matters to record is the combination of the position direction and the funding-rate direction

If positions are falling and the funding rate is extremely negative, that means the shorts who can’t afford the rent are exiting. The remaining holders are forced to pay even higher. What looks “tough” is actually dispersing

If positions are rising while the funding rate is still extremely negative, that’s the real crowding—and the fuel for a short squeeze

August 12 was the former case, but I read it as the latter

There’s another detail I only calculated today

The number of tokens is up by nearly 10 million, but in USD terms, this “bucket” shrank from 21.54 million to 16.10 million—down by a quarter

Yes, the bucket has gotten smaller, but whether it’s “hard” has completely flipped

This isn’t rescuing me—I bet on the funding rate, and the funding rate went the opposite way

Price did drop: from 0.6196 when I posted that piece to 0.3627 now, down 41.5% in four days

The direction was right, but what I bet on was the funding rate. I didn’t write a single word about the price line

I picked the wrong target based on my criteria—the drop I saw afterward has nothing to do with me

Now the contract is 0.3627, down 6.279% over 24 hours. Intraday, it swings between 0.3387 and 0.3913. Contract trading volume is $45.40 million

There are four days left until the batch unlock on August 20

This time I won’t report the unlock volume. The sources I found don’t match—the gap is close to half. If I can’t confirm it, I won’t write it

My new judgment is nailed down right here:

Before the unlock, I bet the funding rate won’t go back into the deep-water zone

From tomorrow through the moment of unlock on August 20, in every settlement tier, if any tier’s funding rate falls below -0.30%, then I’ll count it as me being wrong again. Over the last four days, the deepest funding rate has only been -0.1596%. This one needs to go twice as deep

If none of the tiers break -0.30%, then it means I read it correctly this time

If, in the middle, you see tiers turning positive, that would mean the shorts are cleared even more cleanly than I bet

In the article from four days ago, I wrote with extra certainty

This time I’ll write fewer adjectives

$64,452 and $1,423,608. These are two coins that were delisted by Binance from the same batch tomorrow—each coin’s total trading volume for the past 24 hours. The difference between them is 22-fold.

The one with the lower trading volume is $ACX, up just +0.34% in the past 24 hours. The price barely moved: the highest was 0.04181 and the lowest was 0.04080. All day it stayed within a band about 2.5% wide. The one with the higher trading volume, $VANRY , dropped 26.10% over the same period.

On the Aug 3 announcement, six names were hit at once: ACX, HFT, PIVX, PYR, VANRY, and VIC. They were also delisted on the same day—that is, tomorrow. The “death date” is identical, yet the 24-hour percentage drop ranked them more than thirty positions apart. $PIVX at the bottom is -37.50%, VIC -35.79%, $VANRY -26.10%, PYR -17.65%, HFT -15.22%, and $ACX is the only one still in positive territory.

With the same announcement and the same date, you basically can’t explain this gap by fundamentals alone. You have to look at how many people are still in the market.

$ACX had 1,807 trades in the past 24 hours, with an average of a bit over $35 per trade. This number means there’s basically nobody left on the order book—if nobody is dumping, the price naturally can’t fall. $PIVX is the opposite: starting August 9, it had eight consecutive bearish candles. On that day it opened at 0.0272, and now it’s 0.0090. All along, people kept selling—yet there were counter-parties absorbing the sells the whole way.

Liquidity dies first; price follows later.

People who have held coins that get delisted probably understand this feeling. I used to do the same thing—I’d only remember to place orders on the last day. When I looked at the order-book price, it seemed fine. I put in an order and nothing happened for half a day. In the end, I tossed a random amount in roughly based on the buy-one price. The execution price and the price shown on the screen were completely different. The “price doesn’t move” effect one day before delisting is an illusion—it only means nobody is trading. It doesn’t mean you can actually get out at that price.

$ACX is now 0.04102. It looks more dignified than any other coin in the same batch. But all day it only had a little over 1,800 trades. After tomorrow’s delisting, Binance will close that exit, and whatever liquidity remains will only get thinner. $PIVX is now 0.0090—down ugly—but at least every single trade reflects a price that can truly execute.

At this same time tomorrow, I’ll tally the trade counts and trading volumes again for the six coins, to see whether on the execution day of the delisting $ACX ’s trade count keeps dropping further—or whether people concentrate their selling before the door closes. These two outcomes point to totally different things. The data from today’s half day isn’t enough to tell which one it is.

$63.78$ million traded today on an RWA public chain that normally only sees one or two million dollars move per day—turnover was even higher by 50% than the total daily trading volume of $SOL .

This coin is $PLUME , the chain doing real-world asset tokenization on-chain. The volume was built up over three days: on Aug 12 it moved just $1.66$ million on Binance spot for the whole day; on the 13th, $9.43$ million; on the 14th, $18.03$ million; and on the 15th it shot straight to $92.58$ million—55x in three days. During the same period, $PLUME ’s price went from $0.01141$ to $0.0130$ now, while Binance spot’s 24-hour volume fell 1.81%. The money really came in, but the price is almost stuck in place.

The headliner can be checked. On the night of Aug 14, Korea’s Shinhan Asset Management signed an MOU with Plume to pilot a won-denominated tokenized fund. Shinhan has $133.6$ trillion KRW under management—its scale is definitely intimidating. But the original text of the announcement is quite straightforward: for this round, they’re only doing a concept validation. They won’t issue or distribute, and it will be run inside a segregated structure in a third jurisdiction. They even use contracts and technical measures to block direct access by Korean residents. Put into plain words: a technical drill—product doesn’t land, and Koreans themselves can’t buy it.

The order book is more honest than the news. On Aug 15, all $92.58$ million piled into just a few hourly candles—one of them alone gobbled up $22.78$ million, a quarter of the entire day. That K-line closed at $0.01296$, slightly lower than the previous one’s $0.01305$. With over twenty million dumped in, the price didn’t budge at all. My read is that buy and sell are equally thick, with chips changing hands in place.

The derivatives side is colder. The funding rate now is +0.0013%—nobody owes anyone money in either direction. Across the whole network there are 447 million $PLUME $ held, which comes to about $5.8$ million USD; on the contracts, the daily trading volume is $19.36$ million, less than a third of spot. Spot volume is lively, but nobody is willing to take leverage and bet it will keep running higher—this contrast is more glaring than the price itself.

Volume is already backing off. In the most recent five hours, $PLUME spot traded a total of $1.95$ million—averaging under $0.4$ million per hour. Spread across all of Aug 15, it averaged $3.86$ million per hour. That’s down 90%.

This wave, I’m bearish. A round of volume driven by the news can’t be sustained, and price can’t follow. On Aug 18 when the books are reconciled, there are two thresholds: can daily trading volume stay above $50$ million USD, and can the price hold above $0.0132$? I’m betting neither will hold.

If I get slapped in the face, I’ll admit it right here under this post. I’ve seen too many MOU cases—when people sign, it always feels like the beginning of a story; after signing, most of the time nothing really happens.

$14.26 million was the money dumped into $ACE during that one hour at 13:00 on August 15. In the same hour, $BTC matched $13.45 million on Binance spot.

For a small coin priced a little over twenty cents, the money absorbed in one hour was even more than $BTC , with 174,000 trades versus 18,000. In the past 24 hours, $ACE had $73.8 million in spot trading volume, with 1.287 million trades, ranking first across Binance’s entire market. $ACE is now priced at $0.135, down 31% in 24 hours.

Lined up candle by candle on the hourly chart, the whole story is written on the order book.

13:00 was the fiercest candle of the day, opening at $0.2205, topping out at $0.3498, closing at $0.2730, with all $14.26 million and 174,000 trades packed into those sixty minutes. Up to that point, it was still normal momentum chasing.

The key point is in the next three candles.

At 14:00, 15:00, and 16:00, it closed at $0.2734, $0.2747, and $0.2720, flat as a line. But the money flowing in and out over those three hours totaled $17.68 million, which was $3.42 million more than the hour when it ran up. The price did not move, but money kept changing hands; someone was quietly passing the bag.

The 17:00 candle opened at $0.2718 and dropped as low as $0.1931. Then at 20:00 it was slammed from $0.2033 to $0.1611, and this morning at 09:00 there was another candle from $0.1574 to $0.1364.

I don’t think the money that rushed in at 13:00 and the money that dumped at 17:00 was the same group. The ignition hour was fast and fragmented, with 174,000 trades averaging only $82 per trade; a crowd was fighting to get in. The real sellers were in those three flat candles, with a cost basis around $0.273. People who bought there are now holding $0.135, down more than half.

On the #ACE contract side, the funding rate is the rent shorts pay longs every four hours; the more negative it is, the tighter the short squeeze. At 12:00 on August 15, settlement was still -0.0073%, and by 20:00 it had reached -1.5721%. After that, it converged across three steps: -1.3464%, -1.0236%, and -0.6802%, looking like the shorts were about to unwind. But the 12:00 live reading was still -1.0773%, and it turned back again.

Last night I thought extreme negative funding would naturally converge and shorts would ease first; now I’m only half changing that view. During those three converging steps, the price still slid from $0.1817 to $0.1574. What was suppressing this move was spot sell pressure; the contract shorts were just paying and watching from the sidelines. This morning at 09:44, open interest dropped 5.4% in five minutes, and Binance marked it as long liquidations. Open interest was 74.43 million units, and just that -1.0773% tier alone meant shorts had to pay a little over one hundred thousand dollars.

The test is set in stone here: come back at 16:00 CST on August 17 and check. If the funding rate is still below -0.50% and open interest is still above 60 million units, the crowding has not cleared and $0.135 still needs to test lower. If the funding rate gets back above -0.20%, then I read it wrong.

I’m watching the $0.273 line. If even one of the people who took inventory during those three flat hours wants to get back to breakeven, volume will appear first.

$26.17 for $490.06—today on Binance spot, $TUT and $BTC each average the amount per trade execution.

The side that traded more frequently is the cheaper one. $TUT ’s today’s spot trading volume is $48.96 million, with 1.871 million trades; the number of trades for $TUT ranks first in Binance’s market. $BTC 175.9万笔, ranks second. The trading volume on the $BTC side is 17.6 times that of the first.

In the same exchange, on the same day, the two order books are occupied by two completely different groups of people.

$TUT ’s current price is $0.07436, down 28.14% today, and it has touched a low of $0.06129 intraday. $TUT is the Web3 education project on BNB Chain; after the surge on August 9, it has been paying back its debt ever since.

First, take responsibility.

On the morning of August 10, I wrote an article $TUT and fixed two criteria: if the contract’s open interest denominated in the base asset drops below 260 million tokens, that counts as fuel burned out; if it rises above 390 million tokens, that counts as new money taking over. When I wrote that article, the reading was 301 million tokens.

In the past 48 hours up to now, the open interest oscillated between 269.6 million and 337.4 million tokens; neither of the two lines was touched. Now it’s 331.7 million tokens. In the same period, the price fell from just over 20 cents to over 7 cents—more than 60% down.

After the entire round of the market played out, my two switches I set up never triggered even once. I stepped into the same hole again—the criteria were nailed down, but the “nailing” was in a place the market couldn’t reach.

Look one layer further down. The base-asset open interest of 301 million tokens increased to 331.7 million tokens—yet the number of coins actually went up. But when converted to USD, 60.6 million became 24.67 million, leaving only about 40%. On the contracts side, nobody exited—the positions being held were still the same batch of positions, but each token had become cheaper.

Today’s funding rate had a four-tier settlement: +0.0050%, +0.0050%, +0.0050%. At the 16:00 tier it was raised to +0.0315%. Longs have been paying shorts—though only a little. The long-to-short account ratio is 0.7406, the lowest point in the last 24 hours; there are more accounts taking short positions.

Laying the small orders side by side makes it clearer. EPIC has one trade at $31.24; BICO at one trade $24.90; BANANAS31 at one trade $19.40; $ETH at one trade $234.72. The $26.17 of $TUT falls right in the middle of that group of small-cap coins that dropped the most today.

I didn’t find the cause. I went through the unlock calendar and announcements, and there were no matching unlock schedules in August. Today at 15:41, the official account posted that Aster went live with perpetuals and platform updates, which doesn’t match this liquidation pattern. So for this part, I can only show the order book, not the reasoning.

Change the way I set the criteria—set them at levels the market can reach tomorrow. On August 13 at 16:00, using the same standard, I’ll measure $TUT ’s spot average order again: if it’s above $30, it means large orders are back; if it drops back below $22, it means the small lots are still chewing away, one bite at a time. Those two numbers appeared on August 9 and also this morning; they’re not numbers I just made up on the spot.

There’s one more number I can’t measure. Behind the 1.871 million trades, how many truly distinct accounts are there? The exchange doesn’t publish it, and I flipped through various sources today but couldn’t find a replaceable metric. Tens of thousands of people each place a few trades, and a few programs place over a million orders—their shapes on the order book are identical. But these two things imply completely opposite realities.

$1.823 was pushed to $3.463—pretty much almost doubled. And $PROM finished that move within the four hourly candles this morning.

Yesterday noon I wrote two lines for myself here, and even added a note saying that today would be reachable. In the end, neither line got touched. This morning I woke up and was basically ready to give up.

The original text was: “If the position coin balance stands above 2 million coins, and the fee rate stays below 0, then my squeezed short is considered valid. If any two consecutive hourly fee rates flip positive, to +0.0100% or higher, I admit I was wrong.” The deadline was set for 01:00 last night.

When it expired last night, the position was sitting around 1.57 million coins—still more than 20% short of 2 million—and the fee rate hadn’t flipped positive either. Both lines missed. I didn’t deliver even the last settlement result from that post.

Then this morning at 08:00, $PROM started from $1.823. It closed at $2.395 at 09:00. The 10:00 candle directly drove it to $3.252. At 11:00 it touched $3.463, then got smashed back to $2.666. Now the spot is $2.694, up 25.9% in 24h. It’s third on the market’s daily gainers list for coins safety. On the contracts side it’s reporting $2.65.

Position numbers: 1:57 a.m. was 1.579 million coins, 09:00 was 1.836 million coins, and at 11:00 it surged to 2.838 million. Now it’s 2.708 million.

That 2-million-coins line arrived less than 12 hours late, and then it blasted through by 36% in one go.

As for the fee rate in the same period: it didn’t just fail to flip positive— it went deeper and deeper. #PROM was changed by Binance yesterday to settle once every hour. At 10:00 it was -0.0037%, at 11:00 -0.3028%, at 12:00 -0.5536%, at 13:00 -0.7394%. Now I have a $10,000 short order hanging; just for the 13:00 hourly window alone, it’s going to cost 74 bucks. The long/short ratio in the account fell back from 0.6661 in the morning at 10:00 to 0.9798—shorters are pulling out.

So the call I made yesterday was right in itself. The direction, the structure, and the squeeze form were all correct. The points I got were zero.

The problem was the expiry time. The “valid” condition requires new capital to stand above 2 million coins. That has to rely on people outside re-depositing funds into it. But I only gave it a 12-hour window, including a 12-hour sideways, drifting-down period. Pairing a condition that needs capital to reassemble with a window like this makes it almost destined to miss the expiry. The line wasn’t wrong—I set the stopwatch early.

Plainly put: the threshold and the window together determine whether a line has meaning. Last time I failed because I set the threshold outside the actually-tested range. This time I failed because the time window locked in before the condition even happened.

The new line is written again. The window is extended to 48 hours, through 13:00 on August 14. The direction I’m betting on hasn’t changed—I still think the short side is more dangerous.

Valid: The position keeps above 2.5 million coins, and meanwhile any one hourly fee rate is still at -0.20% or lower. The shorts haven’t run; they’re still paying the longs hour by hour, and that wave above becomes the second segment.

Invalid: The position drops back below 2 million coins, or the fee rate returns above 0 for three consecutive hourly intervals. If any one of these happens, the shorts have already closed, and my side ends. Both lines are still within shooting range for now.

What makes me uncomfortable is that moment at 01:00 last night. Seeing the number 1.57 million, I had already mentally marked this order as a worthless ticket. Seven hours later, all the money came back.

104 million US dollars is the rent paid over the past 24 hours by the short side of $KAITO . In the same day, on Binance spot, everyone combined only managed to trade 2.85 million US dollars. The rent is roughly one-third of the entire spot trading volume.

How did this number come about? I’ll lay out the methodology so you can apply it to measure any coin with abnormal funding rates.

At this moment, the Binance Perpetual contract KAITOUSDT has a position size of 34.757 million tokens, with a mark price of $0.61986. Multiply them together to get a notional position of 21.54 million US dollars. It settles once every four hours, with six tiers per day. In the past six tiers, the rates were -0.7105%, -0.6482%, -1.0158%, -0.6709%, -0.5412%, and -1.2214%, totaling -4.8080%. When the funding rate is negative, the money flows from the short side’s pocket to the long side’s pocket. 21.54 million multiplied by 4.808% equals $1.036 million.

Translated to a personal account: if you’re currently short with a notional of 10,000 US dollars, based on the way it moved over the past day, you’d pay out 480 per day—paid every day.

Yesterday morning, I nailed down two lines here in writing. If any tier returns to above -0.40%, that means shorts start to withdraw—I said I was wrong. If any tier drops below -1.10%, that means shorts are adding more—I said I was right.

This morning at 08:00, the tier that settled at -1.2214% pierced through the first tier in the six tiers’ range—still the new extreme for this cycle. I got this one right.

But the open interest is dropping. 24 hours ago it was 37.90 million tokens; now it’s 34.757 million—down 8.3%. People are moving out, but the price they keep paying for rent is getting higher. The first batch leaving probably can’t withstand this rent. Those still in it are the ones who know they’ll pay nearly 5% per day and keep paying anyway.

In the whole market, the second-highest negative funding rate is $RVN at -0.4400%. It would need to get more than twice as expensive to catch up to $KAITO at its current level.

As for why anyone would keep paying: on August 20 at 12:00 UTC, $KAITO had a confirmation unlock. For the amount, four sources provided three different figures. Tokenomist and TradingView both list 32.60 million tokens, roughly 7.63% of the already released amount. Messari gives 20.70 million. cryip.co converts it to 34.68 million in USD terms. CCN says it’s more than 23.00 million tokens. The two sources with the biggest difference are apart by 11.9 million tokens—close to 60%. I can’t tell who’s correct, so I’m putting all four here. When you pick a source for your own calculations, just keep that in mind.

Someone is willing to keep holding a short position, topping up daily the equivalent of 5% of principal. The short they’re holding is for that batch of chips 8 days later. In this price, there’s an event with a fixed date.

My view today remains the same: before the unlock actually lands, the funding rate won’t return to positive. The current contract price is $0.6196, down 5.14% over the past 24 hours, using the Binance perpetual contract funding-rate calculation.

The new two lines are drawn based on the actual range from the past 24 hours: the shallow end is -0.5412%, and the deepest is -1.2214%. The lines need to be constrained within this range to be meaningful. Today’s remaining five tiers—12:00, 16:00, 20:00, plus tomorrow morning’s 00:00 and 04:00: if any tier returns to above -0.50%, that means shorts start loosening their grip—I said I was wrong. If any tier drops below -1.20%, it means it’s still moving deeper—I said I was right.

Tomorrow morning I’ll come back to close this line. Countdown D-8, with rent moving day by day. This table chimes once every four hours.

One trade of $14.62 turned into one of $23.54. The ruler I placed has been lifted by more than sixty percent in a day. In the same period, $EPIC on Binance spot is down 13.6% over 24h; the current price is $0.406。

As the ruler rises, the market moves downward。

Last night at 22:12, I locked in a criterion: the spot average order amount (i.e., 24h trading volume divided by the number of trades) for $EPIC —only after it returns above $40 will any rebound be the kind of rebound that’s just built from a pile of small change. I set three tiers; tonight at 22:00 the settlement will happen. If it’s below $20, I’m right. If it’s above $40, I’ve been overturned. The middle section is the gray zone—if it lands in the gray zone, I’ll say it plainly: it’s the gray zone。

$23.54. Gray zone。

I could’ve framed this number as good news: the size of one trade has grown by sixty percent. It sounds like big money is coming back to take the bag. But once you split the numerator and denominator, it doesn’t sound so good。

The denominator collapsed by 80% over the day; the number of trades dropped from 1.94 million to 385,000. The numerator fell by less than 30%, and Binance spot trading volume right now is $9.07 million。

The drop below is faster than the drop above, so the average order amount naturally climbs. The group trading in “small change” left first; the remaining people look a bit more decent on average per trade—nothing more than that。

Hourly it’s even clearer. From 19:00 to 21:00, the average climbed steadily from $26.35 to $30.82. During the same period, only about 100k to 200k trades per hour happened, with the trade count fluctuating between 6,000 and 8,000. The numbers look prettier, but the order book is getting thinner。

The place where I need to be held accountable tonight is the ruler itself. This indicator—the average order amount—lies when the overall volume shrinks. It can’t tell whether someone started placing big orders, or whether the people placing small orders just stopped playing. This is a pit I dug myself: when I set the $40 threshold yesterday, I never even considered that the denominator would break first。

At the same second, you can use $HOME as a reference. One trade of $96.36—that’s four times $EPIC ’s. The trade count is only a bit over 200k, yet the order book is more than twice as thick as $EPIC ’s. More money, fewer people, bigger orders—that’s what the average order amount is supposed to look like. Over at $BTC , one trade is $525.62. This $23.54 for $EPIC is something that was squeezed out。

Tomorrow, August 12 at 22:00, I’ll reset the watch at the same time and focus on the denominator again. Only when the trade count is back above 500k and the average order amount holds above $20 can you say that real money has come in to take over. If the trade count keeps falling below 300k, then even if the average climbs to $30, I still won’t admit it—that would mean the market is basically running out of breath。

I wrote down another line: the retail long/short ratio moved from 0.8212 last night to 1.0173 tonight. The longs added people, but the price still fell all day. These two lines are splitting right now—let’s look at them together tomorrow。

The ruler is something I drew myself. The first time I brought it out to use, my own denominator humiliated me. It’s embarrassing—but it’s still better than pretending to understand and then being wrong.

A piece of writing I had finished but never submitted ended up lying in a folder all day. That day, $BMT pulled back the surge from August 9—getting back two-thirds.

Back then it jumped from $0.01313 to $0.03302, a day that more than doubled and a half. I wrote a full horizontal comparison article—three coins laid side by side—finished it and even felt pretty pleased with myself. But it got stuck at the verification stage, and never got sent. Looking back now, it’s kind of funny: getting stuck actually helped me, because in that piece there was a big chunk seriously discussing whether it could hold above $0.03.

Yesterday at 4 p.m. it was still at $0.03294. Now it’s $0.01985—down 31.2% in 24 hours. Today’s low is $0.01946, and it’s only one step away from the floor.

I scrolled through announcements and unlock schedules, but didn’t find any event that matches the drop over these two days, so I can only look for answers in the order book. The answer the order book gives is much colder than a bearish dump.

Spot trading volume in the last 24 hours is $14.91 million. On the surface it looks fine, but once you break it down, the truth shows. From 8 a.m. this morning until now—those eleven hours—volume is only a little over a tenth of yesterday’s full day. Even average per trade keeps shrinking: on the pump day it was $51.88 per trade; yesterday $38.65; today $36.79. There aren’t actually many people dumping. The buyers aren’t coming in either. The money left in the market is fragmenting one transaction at a time.

The futures side is even more explicit. The funding rate is currently -0.001% every 8 hours (the payment that longs and shorts make to each other; the baseline is 0.01%). It’s basically hugging zero, and shorts don’t need to pay even a penny of premium. No one is lining up to short—so that kind of script that relies on shorts covering to hard-pull it up has no fuel. Futures’ daily trading volume is 26 times the current open interest. It’s all intraday round trips—nobody is willing to hold overnight.

So my view is very straightforward: waiting for shorts to get squeezed out so you can copy that bottom is a dead end. The reference that should be watched is the starting point from August 8 at $0.01312. Before the pump, it had been sitting there. It’s still about 50% higher than that now—and this pullback hasn’t finished unwinding yet.

Here’s a line you can verify today. If it breaks today’s low of $0.01946, that’s the next step toward that starting point. If you want me to change my wording, you’d need to see two things at the same time: the price must reclaim above $0.0225 (today’s intraday high hit $0.02329, it’s within reach), and daily trading volume must get back above $20 million. Missing either one doesn’t count.

I’m not going to revise that draft. I’ll leave it in the folder as a reminder. Something that can rise by one and a half times in a day won’t ask you whether you’re there when it comes back.

77 days of uninterrupted trading volumes—that’s only enough to rotate that batch of $WLD chips that hasn’t yet entered the market.

On Binance, WLD’s total supply is listed as 10 billion coins, but the circulating supply is 5.549 billion. The remaining 4.451 billion, converted at the current price of $0.3305, is worth $1.471 billion. And today’s Binance spot 24h trading volume is $18.97 million. Divide these two numbers—77.

This 77 days isn’t for predicting price. It’s just a way to translate the supply side into a tangible unit you can actually reach.

How much of the market’s inventory it can absorb each day, versus how much queue is still waiting to come in—there’s a difference of two orders of magnitude in between.

I’ve been watching this line for a while. In late July I wrote an article about it: the amount unlocked each day was trending downward, and cutting supply should be a positive. But on July 24, from 0.3815 it got smashed all the way down to 0.3389, closing at 0.3473. The word I used to wrap it up was “slow variable,” meaning this thing takes a long time before you can really tell.

From the close on July 22 at 0.3847 to now at 0.3305—almost three weeks. The slow variable still hasn’t kicked in. If I was wrong, I was wrong—I’m not going to make excuses for myself.

Yesterday at least gave a bit of hope. On August 10’s daily candle, #WLD pulled from 0.3127 all the way up to 0.3408 and closed there; the day’s trading value was $24.18 million, the largest single candle in the past ten days. Volume truly surged.

Then today it gave it back. Binance spot 24h -5.95%; current price 0.3305; high 0.3542, low 0.3297. Most of yesterday’s bullish candle got eaten up.

On the derivatives side, I’ve been watching the numbers a bit longer. Open interest is 183.4 million coins — 3.3% of the circulating supply. Converted to money, that’s $60.63 million. Derivatives 24h trading volume is $144.5 million, which is 7.6 times the spot $18.97 million. The pricing power for this coin basically sits in the derivatives market; spot is just a quotation window.

The long-to-short ratio is 1.53, with about 60% of accounts on the long side.

Funding rate is +0.0059%—basically right around zero—so longs are hardly paying anything.

The part I’m not sure about is this: if sixty percent are going long, yet the funding rate isn’t pushed up, it suggests this batch of long positions isn’t heavy and not in a rush—more like they’re hanging around and waiting. If it really needs to move down for a while, whether they can hold up or not is hard to say.

I’ll give myself a condition I can watch. Today’s low is 0.3297. If the price breaks below it, and the long-to-short ratio stays above 1.5 without falling further, then it means the longs are hard-holding—hard-holding generally can’t last too long. Conversely, if the long-to-short ratio drops first, that means someone is actively conceding—then it’s cleaner.

That July piece made me remember one thing. No matter how good the supply-side numbers look, you can’t beat the fact that there’s only $18.97 million in daily spot trading volume to absorb it. The amount the market is willing to eat—that’s the real ceiling.

77 days. I wrote this number down in my notebook. I’ll wait for it to pull another bullish candle like yesterday’s, and then I’ll come back to see whether that number changed.

On Binance futures, the 24-hour trading volume for $BTC was only enough to turn over its own open interest 1.1 times. $PROM turned over 23 times today.

Broken down into numbers: the 24h futures volume of $PROM was $83.31 million, while its total open interest was only worth $3.62 million. With 1.157 million trades, the average per trade was $72; at the same time, the average order size for the $BTC futures contract was $3,676. There is no big money in this market, just small orders hitting each other.

From 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., the price was still lying around $2.03, with 1.086 million in open interest, barely moving. At 6 a.m. people started entering the market, and at 8 a.m. that hourly candle ripped from $2.316 to $2.75. That hour’s trading volume jumped from $1.63 million in the previous hour to $11.05 million. At 9 a.m. it touched the contract’s intraday high of $2.798, while spot pushed all the way to $3.00. From 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., the price was smashed back to $1.582.

What is really worth watching is the moment the funding rate flipped. On August 10, the funding rate for #PROM stayed in all six intervals at the benchmark +0.0050%, with nothing unusual. At 00:00 on the 11th, it turned negative to -0.0071%; at 08:00 it was -0.0106%, still mild. By the 12:00 interval, the settlement rate was -2.0000%.

That number is exactly Binance’s funding-rate floor for it, not a penny more. In the same minute, at 12:01:01, Binance changed its settlement cycle from 4 hours to 1 hour. In plain terms, the futures price had diverged from spot to the point that risk control had to step in, so the exchange increased the charging frequency and forced the spread to close on its own. The next interval, at 13:00, it was back to -0.0107%.

I went through the day’s unlocks, listings, partnerships, and buybacks, and none of them line up with this move. So I can’t explain the cause; I can only say what the order book looks like now.

The most counterintuitive thing about the order book is that open interest kept rising the whole way down. At 05:00 it was 1.086 million, by 11:00 it had risen to the day’s high of 1.978 million, and now it is 1.795 million. In the two hours when price fell from $2.798 to $1.582, open interest not only didn’t shrink, it increased by 425,000. Over the same period, the account long-short ratio flipped from 1.1263 at 9 a.m. to 0.9482 now, meaning short accounts have already become the majority.

New money is chasing shorts on the way down; long liquidations are not the main driver.

My view lands here: at this level, the risk is on the short side. The account-side data has already flipped bearish, and funding is still below zero, which means these new shorts are chasing lower while also paying longs. In this structure, the next move is more likely to squeeze upward once, while a continued smooth decline is the harder path. I could be wrong, but I’m betting this side.

The criterion is fixed: settlement before 01:00 tonight. If any two consecutive 1-hour funding intervals turn positive to ≥ +0.0100% (inclusive), that means the shorts have backed off and the squeeze fuel is gone; the above judgment is invalid, and I admit I was wrong. If coin-margined open interest rises above 2 million while funding remains below 0, then shorts are still adding and still paying, and my case holds. It is now 1.795 million, and both lines are within reach today.

In the 12:00 interval, those on the short side were charged 2% all at once. I’m quite curious how many of them had no idea before today that they were carrying this funding-rate table.

The line I bet on is -0.80%. This morning at 08:00, the $KAITO funding rate settlement came out to -0.8209%, a difference of 0.0209 percentage points—I didn’t hit it.

The criterion is one I wrote myself last night: for the settlements at 04:00, 08:00, and 12:00 on August 11, if any of the three is ≥ -0.80%, then I’m counted as having been right; if two consecutive slots are ≤ -1.50%, then I’m counted as having been wrong. As of now, neither side has settled.

Here are the recent slots:

8-10 16:00 -0.7674%
8-10 20:00 -1.1116%
8-11 00:00 -1.7097%
8-11 04:00 -0.8600%
8-11 08:00 -0.8209%

00:00 was the deepest plunge: -1.7097% hit into my losing line, but it didn’t continue into a second consecutive slot, so it doesn’t count. After that, it climbed back to -0.86% and then -0.82% over two consecutive slots—looks like it’s retracing.

After I finished calculating my account, I changed my mind.

When the funding rate is negative, it means that each settlement, the people who are short have to pay money into the accounts of the long side. The $KAITO contract settles every 4 hours—six times a day. From 00:00 to now (ten hours), the coin price moved from 0.6556 to 0.6534, basically grinding sideways. During that same period, the shorts paid rent twice: -0.8600% plus -0.8209% equals 1.68%. They got the direction right, and the money is flowing backward.

Let’s compare to yesterday. On August 10, the total of the six slots was -4.8857%. Today, the first three slots are already -3.3906%. At this pace to finish all six slots, the rent the shorts pay today will be almost 40% more expensive than yesterday. So much for the “outgoing tide”—the numbers don’t show it.

At this moment, this single glance makes it even clearer. Perpetual mark price is 0.6534, spot index is 0.6649, and futures are 1.7% below spot. In plain terms, the settlement rate is the average of the premium/discount over this period. From 08:00 to now, the discount has been widening, not narrowing.

So for the 12:00 slot, I bet it would be more negative than 08:00, landing between -1.3% and -1.7%, and it won’t return to the -0.80% line. I dare to be wrong.

A few supporting numbers, in one sentence each: contract price $0.6536; 24-hour -5.889%; volume $99.64 million; OI 37.90 million coins is still drifting down from 38.90 million this morning; the long-to-short ratio on retail accounts is 0.5494, and only 35.5% of people are on the long side. The overwhelmingly bearish group is exactly the same group that keeps pulling money every four hours.

As for the unlock batch on August 20, I originally wanted to use it as an explanation. But when I checked, the quantities from the two tracking sites didn’t match—off by one-third. If the verification can’t be trusted, I don’t put it into the main text; I’ll wait until I get the official figures before I talk about it.

One more thing about yesterday’s line: the crowded position I bet on August 10 would be dispersed. At the 20:00 slot it was effectively declared dead, and I acknowledged that last night, so I won’t repeat it today. Its only use this time was to get me to move the line from -1.00% to -1.50%. The result: at the 00:00 slot it already dropped to -1.7097%. The direction moved correctly, but the magnitude still wasn’t enough.

Two hours from now, the 12:00 settlement. Half of my line is likely to die first; if it truly drops below -1.5%, then at the next slot I’ll have to admit my second mistake. The writing style where you set a death line for yourself is a bit self-punishing, but it’s more comfortable than trying to patch things up after the fact.

For every trade executed on Binance spot, the average amount is $436. On the same screen, one trade from $EPIC is $14.61.

It’s thirty times less.

And over the day of $EPIC , the price fell from $1.0387 to $0.4624, a drop of 54.9%. 1.94 million orders piled up on this K-line candle. The number of trades ranks second in the whole market, even more than the 1.55 million trades from $BTC . But when you add up those 1.94 million trades together, the total traded value is only $28.43 million—whereas on the $BTC side it’s $680 million.

More people, less money.

That’s the most straightforward way to use the “average order size” ruler. It has nothing to do with where the price will go; it tells you who’s sitting on the other side of the screen.

$14.61 means most people placing orders are putting in so little that they can’t even buy two cups of coffee at once. On the drawdown leaderboard, a few coins lined up next to it—every single one of their trades is dozens to a hundred-plus dollars. That’s a bit of scale money managing positions. Only $EPIC —this one K-line—is made of nothing but small change trading against itself.

The futures side says it even more plainly. $EPIC ’s open interest is only 13.76 million coins, while the futures day’s traded value is 21 times the notional value of this batch of positions at the current price. The same chips are being passed hand to hand twenty-one times—no one intends to hold through the night.

I’ve been using the average order size ruler for the third day now. The first two times it read nothing but lively scenes; today, for the first time it hit a K-line that got slashed in half, and the answer ended up being even more clear-cut. With 1.94 million orders still catching at this level, it sounds like dip-buying—but with each trade only $14.61, it shows that no single respectable piece of capital is willing to step in and take the load.

The long/short accounts ratio is 0.8212 right now, and 54.9% of accounts are on the short side. The funding rates for the last three order-book settlements are -0.0023%, -0.0061%, and -0.0204%—each one more negative than the last. Shorts are paying longs. When funding turns more negative, it’s usually read as shorts being crowded. But paired with an average order size of $14.61, I’d rather read it this way: the shorts are small change, and the longs are also small change—neither side has anyone capable of pricing this coin.

I wrapped up the books from that morning, too. The morning thesis I wrote for $TUT was: positions are shrinking, price is rising, 60% of accounts are still hanging on the short side, and the funding rate has flipped from negative to positive. So that rally was pushed by shorts closing—no new money came in to take over. Today, $TUT spot is down -27.4%, and the price is back to $0.1164. The funding rate dropped from +0.1273% all the way to +0.0050%, leaving the longs’ willingness to pay mostly as scraps. The thesis held, and this time the direction was right, too.

My call is written in stone. Until $EPIC ’s average order size climbs back above $40, any rebound is just small change stacked up—it won’t be able to catch.

The validation point is also fixed. Tomorrow, August 11th, at 22:00, I’ll pull the 24h spot traded value and trade count for $EPIC and divide them once myself. If the average order size is still below $20, it means big money still hasn’t shown up—this K-line hasn’t finished getting smashed. If it jumps above $40, it means someone truly stepped in to take the trade—only then does it become worth discussing the rebound.

You can use this ruler right now. Open the chart page for any coin on Binance, take the 24h traded value and divide it by the number of trades. The resulting number will tell you who’s pounding the keyboard on this coin today. $14.61 and $436 are two completely different worlds.

I’ll be back at this time tomorrow to reconcile everything. If the average order size really jumps up, I’ll be the first one to write.

On the same negative-fee-rate leaderboard, in the same second, the ratio of the second place to the first place can be 68%, or it can be 30%. The difference is only whether you include four perpetual stocks that were basically not trading at that moment.

Yesterday, what I bet on was the ratio itself—how much the second place on the fee-rate leaderboard is relative to the first—nothing to do with which coin goes up or down. This noon, the “ruler” gave me two answers.

The real readings are right here. $KAITO real-time estimated fee rate: -0.3892%, still the most negative across the whole market. Second place is TBT at -0.2649%, which is exactly 68% of the first. But TBT is a stock perpetual; in Binance contract exchangeInfo, the underlyingType is written as EQUITY. In the past 24 hours its trading volume is over $42k and about 1,100 trades, open interest is $1.7 million. Looking at the liquidation settlement history, every tier is +0.0000%; it has never really collected any money.

Third, fourth, and fifth places are also EQUITY. When I收回 (retracted) the reference to match the underlying directly, the second place becomes EUL at -0.1183%, which is 30% of the first.

So the criteria can’t be settled. When I wrote it, I never specified that the numerator and denominator had to be the same class of asset. The step of using the ratio was correct; if the definition of “the ratio” doesn’t lock the asset class, then effectively you bet nothing. This is the second time this week I’ve fallen for my own formula.

If you want to reproduce it, pull up the contract exchangeInfo and check underlyingType: COIN and EQUITY are listed separately. In the hours around US stock market close, the negative fee rates for EQUITY perpetuals mainly reflect the drift between the mark price and the index price.

On the other hand, I won in another column. $KAITO had three tiers I hard-coded yesterday afternoon. At 20:00 settlement was -0.9810%, at 00:00 it was -0.7241%, and at 04:00 it was -1.3275%. The criteria said that any tier dropping below -1.20% counts as the “second crowding” condition being成立, and 04:00 hit it.

But the one-place entry I casually wrote—“a shallower convergence than the next tier”—was interrupted twice: once by 20:00 and once by 04:00. That line was wrong; admit it as it is.

With the criteria成立, the price is a different story. When I placed the bet, the contract price was $0.6878; now it’s $0.6783. In 21 hours it fell 1.38%. In the same period, shorts paid five times in fee rates: 08:00 -0.6727%, 12:00 -0.2825%, and across five tiers the total is close to 4 percentage points. What they paid out was nearly three times what was returned.

Right now spot is $0.6848, 24h -2.91%; the contract is -1.58%. Spot’s 24h trading volume is only $5.70 million, while the contract side is more than 18 times that. The whole story of this coin is written on the contract side. Open interest shrank from 46.66 million coins at around 1:00 a.m. down to 41.82 million.

Retail long/short account ratio is 0.5468: about 60%+ of accounts are on the short side. Big-holder long/short account ratio is 1.1550, exactly the opposite. Turnover is 3.72x. Next door, $DEXE 1.53x—both sides are real positions.

My conclusion: I gave a fixed call. This round of crowding is being depleted. Shorts keep paying but the price barely moves, and open interest keeps shrinking. The simplest explanation is that both sides are moving out. The criteria are also fixed: for the later three tiers at 16:00, 20:00, and 00:00 CST—two consecutive tiers settling ≥ -0.15% (including exactly equal) counts as me being right; any single tier ≤ -1.00% (including equality) counts as me being wrong. I won’t write what direction the price goes in.

After I change the measurement criteria, I’ll bet again. If tomorrow it also hands me both a 68% and a 30%, then I’ll accept it.

I read the position size of $TUT the wrong way around yesterday morning.

I flipped it pretty decisively. I wrote that the chips were moving out, the baton couldn’t be handed over, and as a result, for half a day the price difference basically doubled.

The criterion itself is fine—the direction I assigned to it was wrong.

The position size really has been shrinking. Open contracts went from 323.5 million coins since 1:00 a.m., down to 301 million coins just now.

But over the same period, when you convert these positions into USD, the value went from $49.34 million to $60.44 million.

Fewer coins, but more money.

Yesterday I only watched the first half of the sentence.

Now the readings are laid out like this: the current price is $0.2014; over the past 24 hours it’s up 62.3%. And today’s daily candle is actually basically flat, opening at $0.2015.

The spot 24-hour turnover is $265 million, with 10.058 million trades—number one across the whole market, about 4.5 times the second place.

Average entry is $26. A bunch of people are cutting meat inside with small knives.

What truly made me change my mind are the other two numbers.

The long/short account ratio is 0.5992—that is, 62.5% of accounts are on the short side.

At the same time, the large-holder long/short position ratio is 1.588, net long.

Retail is short while whales are long. These two groups can’t both be right.

The funding rate has also flipped. The rate in the early hours yesterday was +0.0389%. The settlement rate at 8 a.m. today is +0.10496%. It settles every four hours; the next estimated rate is +0.1293%.

Longs are paying, and the more they pay, the more expensive it gets.

So today I’ll state it clearly: the fuel pushing it up is the shorts’ stop-loss orders. Fresh money hasn’t moved in yet.

The reason is that flipped position-size reading. When coin-denominated positions are shrinking, it means someone is getting off the train; while the price is still rising, it means the shorts that got off were being cleared out.

The strength is also declining. Contract 24-hour turnover is $2.28 billion. Dividing that by the current market value of this pile of positions gives roughly 37x. Yesterday this number was 48x.

It’s still burning—just slower than yesterday.

The two rules I left for myself yesterday haven’t changed: when coin-denominated positions drop below 260 million coins and the funding rate is still positive, then the fuel has burned itself out; only once it stands above 390 million coins and the account ratio drops to below 0.55 do we count it as new money taking the baton.

Now it’s 301 million coins and 0.5992. Both sides are squeezing toward the middle, and neither has made contact.

#TUT Today I’m only watching the 260 million-coin line; I’m not looking at the price.

What I really want you to keep is the lesson—it’s more useful than this coin.

If you look at position size alone, there’s no direction.

When it drops, it could be longs cutting positions, or it could be shorts running.

To judge direction, you first have to look at two signs: which side the account ratio is on, and whether the funding rate is positive or negative.

I had both of these signs in my hands yesterday.

I didn’t look.

I’m adding it today.

On Binance’s spot top losers list, counting from the top downward, the first twenty names—you can’t buy any of them.

$PHB -69.39%、NFP -66.17%、BETA -64.00%。These three are at the very front; it looks like someone got taken down today. But actually, not only are they trading pairs—those pairs are all already halted. Their status is BREAK, so they’ve long stopped matching trades. The “%跌幅” shown in the行情 (market) API is a frozen reading at the moment the trading was halted. After that, it neither updates nor resets; it just stays stuck at the top of the leaderboard, intimidating everyone. In the entire top-20 list of biggest losers, all twenty are in this same status.

We’re too used to assuming everything listed on a ranking can be bought.

Next time a particularly outrageous number shows up at the top of the losers list—say it’s down 60–70%—don’t rush to buy the dip. First, check whether that trading pair is still open. In Binance spot’s exchangeInfo interface, every trading pair has a status field: TRADING means it can be traded, while BREAK means it’s halted. If you don’t want to bother with the interface, that’s fine too—just search the trading pair in the App. If the order page won’t open, then it’s that pair. This step takes ten seconds and can save you an afternoon researching ghost data while doing nothing.

After filtering out all the halted ones, the coin that’s actually tradable and has fallen the most today is $HEI . Binance futures (24h) -17.41%, current price $0.1694. 24h high $0.2051, low $0.1605. It’s currently pressed against the lower band, and in the day it hasn’t really given any meaningful rebound.

This coin’s story actually goes back a few days. On the spot daily chart, the Aug 6 candle—its high touched $0.5401, and it closed at $0.1967. In a single day it chopped off more than 60% from the high. Today’s price is basically where it’s been grinding lower all the way after that big bearish candle.

Contract open interest converted to USD is only $6.46 million, so the float is small. Across the whole net, the long/short account ratio is 0.9501—short accounts are slightly more numerous, but only slightly; it’s not completely one-sided.

So there isn’t much “emotion” in this drop—basically, no one is stepping in.

There’s one more thing I need to correct. In the piece I wrote on Aug 8, I said there were 77 stock tokens on Binance, with total traded value equal to 36.8% of BTC spot. The 77 number came from a clumsy method: I pulled the count of USDT trading pairs whose code ends with B. Today I switched to a definition that can be verified. In exchangeInfo, the USDT trading pairs that belong to the TRD_GRP_261 permission group—those are the exact circle Binance itself assigned to stock tokens. That count comes out to 66. The extra 11 are probably pure crypto coins like TRB, CKB, whose codes just happen to end with B, and I lumped them into the same bucket.

As for the traded value proportion: today is Sunday and US stock markets are closed. Adding up those 66 pairs only accounts for 8.7% of the BTC spot traded value. That 8.7% can’t be smoothly connected to the 36.8% from Aug 8—because the criteria changed, and so did the day of the week. Hard-linking the two is just fooling yourself. Once US markets open on Monday, I’ll re-test everything using the new 66-pair 기준.

The biggest fear when writing a data post is this: whatever the leaderboard gives you, you just believe it. If the code ends with B, you treat it as a stock. Today I stepped on that problem twice—once for the readers, and once for myself.

11.3x and 39.5x are two readings I measured today with the same ruler.

The ruler is simple: take the contract’s 24-hour trading volume and divide it by the current contract open interest. The result tells you how many rounds these positions get turned over in a single day.

11.3x is $MMT . Its current price is $0.2162, and it’s down 7.09% in the last 24 hours. Its spot trading amount is $25.87 million, with 620,000 transactions. Its contract open interest is only $10.49 million, and it’s been flipped eleven rounds in one day.

Looking at just these numbers, it really does look intimidating. This morning, that’s exactly what I thought—I was going to write an article about volume manipulation detection.

Then I measured every coin that moved today, one by one.

$TUT 39.5x. ACE at 27.8x. BICO at 28.1x. KAITO at 6.4x. $BTC 0.29, ETH 0.39—mainstream coins basically fall in this range.

$MMT ’s 11.3x is placed into this row of numbers; it’s only one tier higher than KAITO.

Also, these ruler readings are “live.” At 10 a.m. this morning, when I measured $TUT it was 19x; nine hours later it became 39.5x. Using last night’s number as-is would be wrong.

So today I won’t label $MMT with the tag “volume manipulation.”

I also took a look at the announcement. Binance really is running a trading competition for MMT. It starts on August 6 at 18:00 and ends on August 13 at 18:00, with a prize pool of 2 million MMT voucher tokens. But the rankings only count the cumulative spot MMT/USDT and MMT/USDC volume—contract-side volume doesn’t count.

The money that’s supposed to stack up from boosting should be in the spot market, but spot volume is still less than a quarter of the contract volume. The contest didn’t land the “washed” water in the place I thought it would.

My judgment: no pursuit.

The reason has nothing to do with the competition—it’s about the open interest itself. A contract open interest of a little over ten million, with eleven rounds of turnover, means the money that came in left the same day. Nobody is willing to hold positions overnight. Even if you manage to pump it up, the second runner won’t be able to catch it. With the competition running and it still drops 7.09%, that’s already the answer.

The readings that would slap me in the face are also pre-set: before August 13 at 18:00, if open interest stands above $20 million and the turnover multiple drops to within 5x at the same time—that’s the kind of sign that someone has started holding positions. I would change my mind on the spot.

On the day the competition ends, I’ll measure again.

I’m handing you the ruler: the two numbers must come from the same market, and you should only compare them with today’s like-for-like—comparing against $BTC is meaningless.

Use the current amount, use it now.