Ether Slides to $2,360, Its Lowest Since August: Tracked Hyperliquid Whales Hold $475 Million of ETH Shorts While 75% of Binance Top Traders Are Long — What to Check Before Monday

What happened to the price

ETH closed last Sunday, 11 October, at $2,536.94 on Binance spot. By Sunday 18 October it was at $2,365.67, a 6.8% weekly loss by our arithmetic from the daily closes, against a 3.3% weekly loss for bitcoin. Over 30 days ETH is down 8.8% and it sits 52% below its $4,946 record (CoinGecko, 02:50 SGT).

The selling came in two bursts. Late on Friday 17 October (21:00 UTC, 05:00 SGT Saturday) the hourly candle wicked to $2,356.79 on $56 million of Binance spot volume before bouncing to $2,381. Then on Sunday afternoon UTC, from 13:00 to 16:00, the price slid from $2,418 to a $2,361.23 low in three hours on rising volume while bitcoin barely moved (-0.5% on the day). Sunday's range was $2,361 to $2,430.

The $2,361 print matters because it is the lowest daily level since 21 August, 58 days ago, when CoinGecko's daily series showed $2,327. Below that, the next reference most traders use is the 2 August low near $1,843, the 90-day floor. Above, $2,430 (Sunday's high) and $2,537 (last Sunday's close) are the levels a Monday bounce would need to clear to undo the week.

The whales in our tracked set are short

The NexuAlpha whale board follows a fixed set of large Hyperliquid wallets and reports their positions from Hyperliquid's public API. We re-read every position below directly from the API at 02:56 SGT on 19 October.

Four shorts add up to about 200,800 ETH, or $475 million at Sunday's price. Hyperliquid's own ETH open interest was 1,082,552 ETH (about $2.56 billion) at the same time, so these four wallets alone hold roughly 18.5% of all ETH exposure on the venue. The two biggest wallets are not ETH bears in isolation. 0x5b5d…c060 runs a $148 million account that is short BTC ($224 million, entry $76,205), SOL ($74 million), HYPE ($44 million) and ZEC ($45 million) as well; 0xb83d…6e36 holds $137 million and is short BTC ($205 million), HYPE ($53 million) and ZEC ($53 million). Both are losing on their BTC shorts (-$13.7 million and -$8.4 million) and making money on ZEC shorts (+$16.2 million and +$12.3 million). ETH is close to breakeven for both.

The newest activity is smaller but tells you the direction. At 01:30 SGT on 19 October our feed flagged a coordinated-short signal: three tracked wallets (0xdf95…7d72, 0x880a…311c and 0xfe7c…b7ae) added a net $3.91 million of ETH shorts within 24 hours at an average entry of $2,406. 0xfe7c…b7ae alone has been adding over two days, 84 fills, at 25x. On the other side, 0x6046…b21d opened a new $26.3 million ETH long at $2,401.68 at 07:07 SGT on Saturday and is already $412,000 underwater, alongside an $81 million BTC long from $81,833.

The sizes explain why these shorts are hard to dislodge. With 5x cross margin and nine-figure account values, 0x5b5d…c060 is not liquidated until ETH trades at $4,220 and 0xb83d…6e36 until $4,817. A squeeze that only lifts ETH back to $2,500 costs them money but does not take them out. The $26 million long, by contrast, has its liquidation price at $1,022, so it is also safe from a normal move. Neither side is forced; the forced sellers this weekend were smaller leveraged longs on the centralised venues.

Crowd long, whales short

Binance's futures data shows the other half of the picture. The top-trader long/short account ratio on ETHUSDT rose from 2.64 on 16 October to 2.92 on 17 October and 3.08 on 18 October, meaning 75.5% of the top-trader accounts were net long on Sunday. Binance ETH perpetual open interest fell from 2,375,942 ETH ($5.75 billion) on 15 October to 2,266,568 ETH ($5.44 billion) on 18 October, a 4.6% drop in three days, which is positions being closed into the move, not added.

Funding is not rewarding either side. Binance's last ETH funding rate was 0.00299% per eight hours, OKX's 0.0064%, and Hyperliquid's hourly rate was slightly negative at -0.0015%. Funding this flat means shorts pay nothing meaningful to stay in, and longs are not being paid to hold through the drawdown.

The liquidations

NexuAlpha's liquidation tracker records forced orders on Binance and OKX. In the 24 hours to 02:47 SGT on 19 October it logged $457.4 million of liquidations across all pairs: $334.0 million of longs and $123.4 million of shorts in 88,234 orders. ETH accounted for $96.3 million of that ($89.8 million on OKX, $6.5 million on Binance), behind XRP ($127.8 million on OKX) and BTC ($106.1 million on OKX). The largest single ETH liquidation was a $1.19 million long on OKX at 21:34 SGT on Sunday.

The last four hours are more one-sided: $33.8 million liquidated, of which $32.4 million were longs and $1.4 million shorts, with ETH the biggest symbol at $18.1 million. That is the Sunday afternoon slide from $2,418 to $2,361 clearing out leveraged longs who were positioned for a rebound.

Why ETH is weaker than bitcoin this week

Two flows explain most of the gap. First, spot ether ETFs lost a net $320.1 million in the week of 12 to 16 October, $299.0 million of it from BlackRock's ETHA, after $542.2 million left the week before (Farside Investors, as covered in our ETF flows report). Bitcoin ETFs also bled, $228.6 million for the week and about $910 million over two weeks according to Decrypt, but the ether funds are smaller, so the same dollars move the price more. Second, the whale positioning above: the largest tracked accounts are short ETH and SOL as well as BTC, and they have been adding on bounces, which caps every rally attempt.

ETH is not alone among the large alts. Over seven days SOL is down 9.1%, XRP 10.5% and DOGE 11.0% (CoinGecko), so the weekend was a broad de-risking in which ETH's 7.1% drop is mid-pack, not an ETH-specific event. The difference is that ETH is the one with $475 million of visible short interest from a handful of wallets sitting on top of it.

What to check before Monday

• Your liquidation price, not the whale's. If you are long ETH with leverage, the levels that matter are $2,357 (Friday's wick) and $2,318 (the 15 October low). A break of both opens the gap to the August levels around $2,327 and, further down, $1,843.
• Whether the shorts start covering. The whale board updates the four wallets above. A reduction in 0x5b5d…c060's or 0xb83d…6e36's ETH short would be the first real sign the pressure is easing; more adds mean more of the same.
• Funding and open interest at 08:00 SGT. Funding resets at 00:00 UTC. If Binance funding turns clearly negative while price holds $2,360, shorts are crowding in late and a bounce becomes more likely; if it stays flat and OI keeps falling, the market is simply de-leveraging.
• The ETF print for Monday. Another outflow day for ETHA after two red weeks would confirm that the spot bid is still missing.
• Monday's US open. The ETF flow and the top-trader ratio are both US-session phenomena. The 21:30 SGT open is when the week's direction tends to set.

How to act on this

If you want to trade this rather than watch it, do it where the data above comes from. The shorts are on Hyperliquid, where you can see every tracked wallet's fills on-chain and funding is settled hourly; sign up with code NEXU888 through the Hyperliquid profile if you open an account there. If you prefer a centralised venue, Bitget's ETH perpetual charges 0.02% maker and 0.06% taker, and opening the account with code nexu888 via the Bitget profile returns part of your trading fees. Whichever you use, size the position so that a move to $2,318 or to $2,500 is survivable; the whales are built to sit through either, and most of the weekend's forced sellers were not.

Quick answers

Is ETH at a new low? No. $2,361 is the lowest since 21 August 2026, not a 2026 low; the 90-day low is $1,843 from 2 August.

Who is short ETH? In NexuAlpha's tracked set, four Hyperliquid wallets hold about $475 million of ETH shorts, led by 0x5b5d…c060 with 106,350 ETH and 0xb83d…6e36 with 73,820 ETH. They also short BTC, SOL, HYPE and ZEC.

Can they be squeezed? Not easily. Their liquidation prices are $4,220 and $4,817 because they run 5x cross margin on nine-figure accounts; a rally to $2,500 hurts them but does not force a cover.

How much was liquidated? $96.3 million of ETH in 24 hours on Binance and OKX, $18.1 million of it in the last four hours, nearly all longs.

Why is the crowd long? Binance's top-trader long/short account ratio was 3.08 on Sunday, so three in four top-trader accounts were net long, while open interest fell 4.6% in three days.

Does funding show a squeeze? No. Binance 0.00299% per eight hours, OKX 0.0064%, Hyperliquid -0.0015% per hour: effectively zero on all three.

What we could not verify

Hyperliquid wallets are pseudonymous, so we cannot say whether 0x5b5d…c060 and 0xb83d…6e36 belong to the same operator or whether the shorts hedge spot or ETF holdings elsewhere. Our liquidation figures cover Binance and OKX only. Monday's ETF flows are not published until after the US close.