Short sellers on ACE paid a continuous penalty to keep their downward bets open, signaling crowded bearish sentiment around $0.184.
Imagine ACE is trading at about $0.184. A large group of traders rushes in to bet that the price is going to tumble. But when too many people crowd onto one side of the market at once, the system begins charging them a fee.
Across ten consecutive minutes, automated alerts fired as the fee to hold downward bets remained unusually severe near -0.0719%. Even though the token price barely moved, the cost to bet against ACE stayed extraordinarily high.
This fee is called the funding rate. In perpetual contracts, when short sellers outnumber buyers by a wide margin, the exchange forces those sellers to make regular payments directly to buyers to balance the market.
A single spike can be brief noise. A ten-minute streak shows that short sellers are determined, willingly paying high ongoing fees just to keep their downward positions alive. The trade has become heavily congested.
A negative funding streak does not mean the price must fall. If the price rises even slightly, sellers paying these steep fees may rush to exit at the same time, triggering a fast upward squeeze instead.
Do not think heavy shorting means an inevitable drop. Think of it as a room full of traders paying expensive rent to stay short, creating volatile tension that could snap in either direction.