$STEEM This drop isn’t too vicious, but it turns out someone has quietly been running.
On the 15m timeframe, it’s down 2.77% with volume at only 0.79x. The chart looks calm and orderly, but what’s really interesting is the derivatives side—OI fell 6.72% over the past hour, and on 15m it’s -3.18%. Nominally, that’s a reduction of nearly 600k USDT. The price is down while OI is also down; this isn’t a typical case of fresh shorts entering to smash the market. Instead, the longs themselves couldn’t hold on—reducing positions and getting swept out by stop-losses.
This kind of move is actually more worth paying attention to than a sudden volume-driven dump, because it’s leverage draining one-way, not longs vs shorts actively rotating.
The funding rate is still in the higher percentile recently, which means the leveraged longs who crowded in here were already quite overextended. Now they’re just starting to unwind. Active trading is down 0.9%, buy/sell ratio is 1.02. The spot side is barely panicking—this is purely de-leveraging on the derivatives side.
The OI percentile is abnormally high at 92.3%, placing it at
#14 across the whole pool. Recently, I’ve seen this kind of structure quite a few times—the price grinds along the boundary of the range while funding is high, and usually it hasn’t bottomed out yet.
Don’t rush to catch it. First, watch when OI actually stops falling.