Traders betting against ACE paid continuous cash penalties to keep their positions open over ten straight minutes, revealing a heavily crowded trade.
Imagine ACE is trading quietly around eighteen cents. A huge group of traders rushes in to bet that the price will fall, far outnumbering anyone betting it will go up.
Over ten minutes, the price of ACE held steady between $0.1830 and $0.1836. Yet every minute, an unusually high fee of around negative 0.10 percent continued to register.
Crypto derivatives markets use a balancing fee called the funding rate. When sellers heavily outnumber buyers, the sellers are forced to pay cash directly to the buyers every cycle to keep their trades open.
Think of a ferry where too many passengers crowd onto the port side. To keep the boat upright, the operator makes the left-side passengers pay a fee to anyone willing to stand on the right side.
A brief spike in fees can be random noise. But ten alerts in ten minutes show that traders betting on a decline are aggressively holding their ground, even while losing money on fees every minute.