$ASTER These past couple of days, I’m really starting to go in at full intensity. The long positions are directly set up. <br/>ASTER is also hovering around 0.75.<br/><br/>This time, I don’t really want to treat it as a regular rebound, because the recent messages all came out together.<br/><br/>🔥 September 28: Aster just launched Perpetual Grid 2.0, and at the same time started a 4-week liquidity mining program. The maximum rewards are up to 140,000 A STER tokens, running all the way until October 25. In plain terms, they’re continuing to find ways to push trading volume into the platform.<br/><br/>💰 The token side hasn’t been idle either. The official Tokenomics was just updated: protocol revenue will continue to allocate part of it toward buying back A STER. VIPs have also directly added higher A STER holding requirements, and contract fees can be paid with A STER to save an additional 5%. That’s a lot more comfortable than the simplistic “the platform got hot, and the coin just goes up with it.”<br/><br/>Now let’s look at positioning—this is where it gets interesting.<br/>On Binance, the current A STER perpetual contract OI is about 126 million tokens.<br/>For regular accounts, longs are roughly 56%—not particularly extreme. But for the whales, the long/short positioning ratio is already close to 3.93, with about 80% of whale positions concentrated on the long side.<br/><br/>Even wilder: the funding rate is only around 0.005%.<br/>So it means: whales are clearly leaning long, but the market hasn’t gotten expensive enough to a point where “longs can’t afford rent.”<br/><br/>In the last 4 hours, the buy/sell ratio by active trading has also climbed back to around 1. The earlier sell pressure has obviously eased.<br/>So this time, I’m willing to take a long trade with size.<br/>📌 I’m not betting on just one candlestick.<br/>I’m betting that:<br/>• the new product just launched<br/>• mining rewards just started<br/>• the platform is still continuing to add real usage scenarios for A STER<br/>• whale positioning is clearly leaning long<br/>When these factors collide, if 0.75 really gets absorbed, sentiment can easily accelerate suddenly afterward.<br/>Of course, there’s one thing I’m not pretending not to see—whales are already pressing quite heavily toward longs. If the price can’t move up, then this batch of positions is also a risk in the other direction.<br/>But given the current positioning structure, I’d rather stand with the longs.