Traders betting against SKR paid steep ongoing fees to hold their positions across a ten-minute window, signaling extreme one-sided selling pressure in the market.
Imagine SKR is trading at about $0.026. An unusually large number of traders want to bet that the price is heading down, creating an imbalance between buyers and sellers.
To keep the market balanced, the trading platform charges the crowded side a fee. Over ten straight minutes, traders betting downward were charged a steep rate of roughly 0.50% per hour.
This balancing mechanism is called the funding rate. When bets lean heavily negative, downward bettors pay cash directly to upward bettors as an incentive for them to keep the market open.
Alerts fired every minute for ten minutes because the fee remained deeply negative. Paying half a percent every hour adds up fast, proving that sellers were willing to burn money just to hold their positions.
A deeply negative rate does not guarantee the price will drop. If the price refuses to fall, sellers paying this high hourly fee may give up and exit, which can cause the price to snap upward quickly.
Do not think negative funding means the coin is guaranteed to crash. Think of it as a crowded room paying an expensive fee to stay inside, creating tension that could break in either direction.