Binance's ether futures book grew 2.27% in coins during a price drop that cut its dollar value 6.58%

CryptoSlate split the ether book's value change into a quantity piece and a price piece ^[7]. At the starting implied valuation, the 51,799 ETH of added open interest was worth about 140.3 million USDT. Repricing the ending stock then took off about 546.5 million, leaving a net fall of about 406.2 million ^[15][7]. New contracts offset roughly a quarter of the repricing loss ^[21]. In bitcoin both pieces pointed down. A book 1,370 BTC smaller subtracted about 117.4 million USDT and repricing took 365.6 million more, so price accounts for about three quarters of the roughly 483 million decline ^[26][8][22]. The split is a convention: CryptoSlate assigns the interaction between quantity and price to repricing, and reversing the order moves the allocation without changing the net ^[9].

Value divided by quantity in the records fell from 2,708 to 2,474 USDT per ETH, an 8.6% drop, and from 85,718 to 81,784 USDT per BTC, a 4.6% drop ^[6][16][17]. CryptoSlate says these are valuations implied by the open-interest records, not separately observed spot prices ^[6]. Compounding a 2.27% gain in coins with an 8.64% fall per coin gives a 6.57% decline, the reported figure to within rounding ^[25].

Whether traders added ether into the decline depends on when the decline happened. Before Thursday the ether book had grown 120,078 coins, or 5.3%, from its Oct. 6 start ^[18]. Thursday's cut of 68,279 ETH took back about 57% of that ^[19]. Bitcoin's book had grown just 1,536 BTC before Thursday and then lost 2,906, nearly twice its gain ^[20]. The gap between the two contracts opened on Oct. 6 and 7. The implied valuations in the report cover only the two ends of the 69-hour window, so the data cannot place the 8.6% price drop in the build or in Thursday's cut ^[5][6].

If most of the price drop landed on Oct. 6 and 7, traders did add contracts as prices fell, and the cumulative figure means what it seems to. If it landed on Thursday, the ether went on at higher valuations and part of it came off during the selling. A third possibility is churn: open interest is a stock measured at a moment, and new positions can offset closures within the same period ^[12]. Funding on Oct. 8 settled within about 0.0035 percentage points of zero for both contracts, moving from slightly negative at midnight to slightly positive by 16:00 UTC ^[27][13][14].

I lean toward the Thursday version, because Thursday is when both books shrank together ^[10][11]. On that view the ether book was built ahead of the selling and partly unwound during it. It still finished 51,799 ETH larger, while bitcoin traders ended the window 1,370 BTC lighter ^[15][26]. Hourly implied valuations showing most of the 8.6% drop before Oct. 8 would prove this wrong, and would make the 2.27% a fair measure of traders buying as prices fell ^[16][1].