Ether rallied 5.7% on Wednesday to $4,337, igniting a wave of derivatives activity as futures open interest climbed and options traders leaned into bullish bets.
Key Highlights:
- ETH futures open interest reached $57.4 billion across exchanges, with Binance leading.
- Options positioning shows calls outweighing puts by 63% to 37%.
- Traders are stacking positions at higher strike calls, led by a December 2025 $6,000 contract.
- Despite bullish flows, short-term volumes show hedging with a slight put tilt.
Data from Coinglass showed ETH futures open interest at 13.28 million ETH ($57.43 billion), still below late August’s $70 billion peak. Binance topped the leaderboard with $11.25 billion, followed by CME at $9.39 billion and Bitget at $6.54 billion. Other venues including Gate, Bybit and OKX each carried between $3.4 billion and $5 billion.
Momentum tilted bullish across most platforms in the past day. Binance open interest rose nearly 6%, CME gained 6.4%, and WhiteBIT surged 6.7%. Bitget and OKX also climbed, while BingX and Kucoin posted small declines.
Options markets also favored upside. Open interest showed 1.8 million ETH in calls compared with 1.05 million ETH in puts — a 63% to 37% split. Deribit data highlighted strong positioning in the December 2025 $6,000 call, followed by contracts at $4,000, $5,000, and $7,000 strikes.
Still, volume flows told a more cautious story. Call and put volumes were nearly balanced in the past 24 hours, with a slight lean toward puts. Active trades included Bybit’s March 2026 $500 put, Deribit’s October 2025 $4,000 put, and Binance’s near-dated $4,400 call.
Max-pain models suggested ether’s pressure point sits in the low-to-mid $4,000s through early October, with risks dipping toward $3,900–$4,000 into month’s end. Analysts noted that while ether’s rally has fueled bullish positioning, the put-side activity signals traders are hedging against sharp reversals.