ETH Taker Selling On Binance Hits -$2.3B As Open Interest Rises

ETH taker selling on Binance has pushed cumulative net taker volume to about minus $2.3 billion. The price still sits above where it was in late August. A CryptoQuant Quicktake by Amr Taha flagged the split on October 7. Binance's own trade data shows the same direction, and open interest on the exchange has been rising rather than falling.

Amr Taha's CryptoQuant Quicktake, Binance ETH cumulative net taker volume, open interest and price.

ETH taker selling since August 22

The Quicktake's chart shows ETH taker selling building for six weeks. The cumulative line peaks around August 22, then slides, with only brief recoveries in mid-September. ETH's price on the same chart, the black line, stays roughly flat to higher.

Rebuilding it from Binance's daily candles gives a similar picture. On the ETHUSDT perpetual, net taker flow from August 21 to October 7 comes to about minus $3.7 billion. Including the USDC-margined contract the figure widens to roughly minus $4.5 billion, close to the Quicktake's $4.2 billion swing. Bitcoin's two perpetuals sum to about minus $5.1 billion over the same span. The author reports $5.71 billion, so the combined $9.9 billion headline is roughly right even if definitions differ.

Weekly slices show where the selling landed. Five of the seven weeks since August 21 were net selling. The two weeks around mid-September were flat. The latest stub, October 1 to 7, was the heaviest at about minus $1.15 billion. It came on only $44 billion of volume, the lightest of any slice.

Price held while open interest grew

ETH closed October 7 at about $2,573 on the perpetual, up roughly 2.3% from $2,516 on August 21. Sellers were active but could not push it down. That resilience is the part of the story worth watching.

Open interest says traders were adding exposure. On Binance's USDT-margined contract it moved from $5.59 billion on September 9 to $6.24 billion on October 7, an 11.6% gain. A live read on October 8 shows 2.38 million ETH outstanding. The daily taker buy/sell ratio dropped to 0.85 on October 7, its lowest in ten days.

Rising open interest with taker selling is the combination the Quicktake reads as short exposure building. Binance's account-level long/short ratio does not agree. It shows about 3.4 long accounts for each short account. That points to a crowd leaning long while the most aggressive flow sells. Traders on both sides can be right about their own side of the book, because accounts count heads and taker volume counts dollars.

R3N's CryptoQuant Quicktake, ETH open interest across all exchanges against price.

A second Quicktake disputes the leverage story

R3N's Quicktake argues leverage has not returned to ETH. It puts all-exchange open interest at $13.9 billion, about 30% below a roughly $20 billion peak from mid-2025. The chart's own axis tells a harsher story. Its mid-2025 spike climbs to about $32 billion, which would put today's reading more than 50% under the high.

Either measure leaves open interest well below the old peak while price has recovered toward $2,500. That gap is the point both authors circle. Whether the lag closes through more leverage or through price giving back ground is what this chart cannot say.

Flow, open interest and price figures come from Binance's public API and CryptoQuant as of October 8, 2026. This is a read on positioning and not a call on where ETH trades next.