Just took a quick look at the Binance futures data, and the funding rate for $LA is sending some interesting signals.

$LA is currently priced at 0.1180 USDT, up 4.9% in the last 24 hours, but the open interest (OI) has surged 15.4%. Breaking it down by time: 2.0M → 1.9M → 2.0M → 2.3M, real money is piling in. The 24-hour trading volume is $10.5M, with a market cap of $31.8M, and the spot trading pairs are still active, so liquidity on the books isn’t an issue.

The key point is the funding rate: it jumped from +0.0009% straight to -0.0014%—the funding rate has turned negative, indicating that shorts are ramping up. At the same time, the open interest is skyrocketing, with both bulls and bears heavily positioned against each other. There have also been 10 relevant news articles recently, showing decent media attention, with one mentioning that Blockchain.com secretly submitted a proposal.

What’s intriguing is that the price has risen 4.9%, yet the funding rate has turned negative. The price is holding strong, but shorts are adding to their positions, creating a “short fuel” setup—once the shorts can’t handle the costs and start to close out, it could easily trigger a short squeeze. As the cost for shorts rises and the open interest grows, the longer the funding rate stays negative, the higher their holding costs will become.