Akedo open interest on Binance has fallen by half since 23 October while the price of AKE dropped 85%. The value of futures contracts still open on the token was $9.9 million at 13:00 UTC on Monday, against a peak of $19.8 million on the evening of 23 October.
AKE changed hands at about $0.0059 on Binance’s AKEUSDT perpetual contract, a futures contract with no expiry date, at 13:12 UTC, 35% lower than 24 hours earlier and about 96% under the $0.1647 high of 20 September. Prices like these were last seen in late August, before the run that took the token to that September peak. Binance has no spot market for AKE, so the contract is where most of the trading sits.
Akedo open interest has halved in dollars and tripled in tokens
Akedo open interest can be counted two ways, and the two counts now point in opposite directions. In dollars it went from $19.8 million to $9.9 million. In tokens it went from 0.49 billion AKE to 1.64 billion. The gap is the price. A dollar buys more than six times as many AKE as it did on 23 October, so a position of the same dollar size now covers far more tokens. Most of the growth in Akedo open interest, counted in tokens, came after the evening of 30 October, when it stood at 0.56 billion.
Funding, the small fee one side of a perpetual contract pays the other every four hours to keep its price close to the token’s price, has been negative for most of that time. Thirteen of the 16 payments since 31 October were negative, which means traders holding shorts, bets on a fall, paid those holding longs, bets on a rise. Every payment since 04:00 UTC on Sunday has been negative. The largest, at 04:00 UTC on Monday, was 0.444% of position size, and the 12:00 UTC payment was down to 0.053%. Binance counts Akedo open interest in tokens, so a price fall does not shrink the token line by itself, a point the XPL flash crash also showed.
Sunday and Monday each began with one sharp drop
Both big falls started in the 02:00 UTC hour. On Sunday 1 November the contract dropped from 0.0114 to a low of 0.0084 inside that hour, with $23.3 million traded. A day later the slide ran for three hours, from 02:00 to 05:00 UTC, taking the price from about 0.0088 to as low as 0.0058 on $47.5 million of trading. The low of the day so far, 0.00524, came near 08:00 UTC.
Two prices decide what comes after Monday’s low
An hourly close above 0.00836, Sunday’s low, would put AKE back over the level it lost on Monday and leave 0.00886, Monday’s early high, as the next price on the chart, while a close back under 0.00836 would cancel that. An hourly close under 0.00524, Monday’s low, would put it lower than at any point since late August, so the chart has no recent price to mark a floor.
Akedo has not posted on X since 18 October
The project’s official account, @akedofun, last posted on 18 October, a quote of a Binance post. The three posts before it are dated 14 October, 4 October and 29 September. Nothing on the account explains the fall.
The price record shows where the fall began. AKE spent 25 and 26 October between roughly 0.028 and 0.032, then lost 29% from one daily close to the next on 27 October. It fell another 34% on 30 October and 21% on 1 November. Before that, on 21 October, the day of the latest monthly release of tokens, it dropped from 0.0328 to 0.0239 and then climbed to 0.0405 two days later.
The next release of tokens is due on 21 November
Tokenomics.com lists the next AKE unlock for 21 November: about 2.1 billion tokens, or 2.1% of the 100 billion total supply. CoinGecko counts 22.8 billion AKE in circulation, so the release would add about 9% to what is already trading. At Monday’s price it is worth around $12 million, less than a tenth of what the Binance contract turned over in the past 24 hours. The schedule gives 47.4% of it to private investors, 22.1% to insiders and 30.5% to the community.
The same page records what followed earlier releases, measured as the worst fall in the 14 days after each date. It shows 72.2% after the 21 October unlock, 48.9% after 21 September and 21.9% after 21 August, while the 21 July release was followed by a 1.0% rise. A fall after a release date does not show that the release caused it.
Most of AKE’s trading takes place in futures. The Binance contract turned over $129 million in 24 hours, against about $26 million in PancakeSwap and Uniswap pools on BNB Chain and about $12 million across the centralized spot exchanges CoinGecko lists, led by Gate at $6.0 million and KuCoin at $2.9 million.
