Ethereum open interest hits $7.7B, raising the chance of a short squeeze above $1.5K

The Ether futures premium remains negative, while options markets are pricing similar risks for bulls and bears.

Traders’ sentiment about Ether (ETH) has noticeably improved as the price rallied 7.5% from Oct. 2 to 6, but the price recapturing the $1,350 level was not compelling enough to trigger any bullish activity from derivatives traders.

Ether price is still 32% below the $2,000 level last seen on Aug. 14 and the network’s average transaction fee stood near $2 after the Merge .

The most significant upgrade on the Ethereum chain happened on Sept. 15, switching from energy-intensive mining technology to a set of validators required to deposit 32 ETH in staking.

Although necessary to implement future sharding or parallel processing capability, the Merge was not designed to solve scalability issues in the current phase. Consequently, the Ethereum network holds none of the top-5 decentralized applications by users, according to DappRadar.

For this reason, analysis of derivatives data is valuable in understanding how confident investors are about Ether