MYX funding hits 10.95% APR as longs crowd the market

Funding at Historic Lows Despite Elevated Cost

MYX presents a counterintuitive picture: an aggregated funding rate of 10.95% APR—among the highest absolute borrowing costs in derivatives markets—is paired with a funding percentile of 1, meaning it sits at the extreme bottom of its own 90-day range. This disconnect deserves scrutiny. The 10.95% rate itself remains expensive for long holders, who pay shorts to maintain exposure. Yet relative to MYX's recent volatility and positioning swings over the past three months, the current reading suggests funding has collapsed from even more stretched extremes. A percentile of 1 indicates that only the rarest trading days in the lookback window saw funding lower than today—a signal that the market has already begun pricing out the most acute crowding in long leverage.

At a funding percentile of 1, MYX's 10.95% rate is historically compressed relative to its own recent peaks, even as absolute costs remain elevated.

This reversal is meaningful. When funding rates swing sharply downward after periods of extreme positivity, it often reflects forced position reduction or profit-taking among long holders who found the carry unsustainable. The cost of holding leverage has fallen from levels that were clearly extracting pain, yet it remains above zero-carry neutral. That tension—high absolute cost colliding with historically low relative cost—suggests a deleveraging cycle is underway but not yet complete.

Open Interest Contracting Over Seven Days

The seven-day open interest change of -16.2% corroborates the deleveraging narrative. Over the past week, notional positioning in MYX has shrunk by a meaningful margin, with current total open interest standing at $11.0M. While the 24-hour OI change is unavailable, the weekly trend is unambiguous: positions are being unwound. This is not a period of accumulation or leverage building; it is a net reduction phase.

A -16.2% drawdown across seven days is substantial enough to signal genuine repositioning rather than noise. It reflects traders exiting exposure—whether voluntarily to lock in gains, or involuntarily through closeouts as margin grew tighter. The total OI pool of $11.0M remains modest in absolute terms, consistent with MYX being a smaller or newer perpetual futures venue. Yet the pace of contraction matters more than the absolute size: capital is leaving.

Balanced Liquidations Amid Unwinding

The liquidation imbalance of +0.00 over the 24-hour period stands in stark relief against the broader deleveraging trend. A neutral imbalance means that longs and shorts faced equal forced liquidation pressure in the most recent session—a balanced washout. Neither side held a structural disadvantage during the latest cycle of margin failures. This balance is noteworthy because it suggests the unwinding is not being driven by a one-directional liquidation cascade. Instead, the contraction in OI appears to reflect a mix of voluntary profit-taking, voluntary risk reduction, and balanced forced exits.

Neutral liquidation dynamics often accompany orderly deleveraging, where markets absorb reduced leverage without violent cascades. In MYX's case, the absence of directional liquidation skew implies that both longs and shorts have been gradually stepping back from concentrated bets simultaneously.

Leverage Risk Score in Elevated Territory

Despite the deleveraging narrative, MYX's leverage risk score of 88 remains in elevated territory on a 0-100 scale. A composite score of 88 reflects fragile or crowded leverage conditions—the kind that warrants caution. This apparent contradiction between falling OI and a high risk score requires interpretation. Risk scores are typically calculated from multiple inputs: funding extremes, OI concentration, volatility, and sometimes estimates of leverage density within the remaining positions. Even as total notional OI has fallen 16.2% in a week, the quality of remaining leverage may still be stretched.

In other words, MYX may have shed a layer of outer, less committed leverage, but the core of active positions appears tilted toward aggressive betting. The residual 16.2% of OI that remains could be concentrated among traders running tighter margins or higher leverage ratios, or held by fewer counterparties. A high risk score paired with contracting OI often signals that the clearing process is incomplete—that further deleveraging may be required before positioning normalizes.

What would change this read

The current narrative of compressed-but-stretched leverage would reverse under several concrete conditions. If funding normalized toward the range typical of MYX's 90-day history—moving up from its current percentile of 1 to a more central level—that would suggest crowded longs had returned and long-side demand had re-emerged. Conversely, if open interest reversed its seven-day contraction and began growing again, that would signal fresh leverage entering and a shift from unwinding toward accumulation. A liquidation imbalance that swung sharply positive (favoring short liquidations) would indicate longs had absorbed the deleveraging pressure more acutely, pointing to directional stress. Finally, if the leverage risk score dropped materially below its current 88, that would confirm the fragility had genuinely eased. Until one or more of these conditions materializes, MYX remains in a state of contested unwinding: funding and OI suggest deleveraging is underway, yet the risk score warns that remaining positions retain elevated fragility.