Polkadot traded at $0.9385 late on Monday evening, November 2, which is 20.7 percent lower than 30 days ago. The futures market stands out: on OKX, 69.6 percent of accounts with an open DOT p
Polkadot traded at $0.9385 late on Monday evening, November 2, which is 20.7 percent lower than 30 days ago. The futures market stands out: on OKX, 69.6 percent of accounts with an open DOT position are still betting on rising prices, while the funding rate of the perpetual contract has turned negative. What the data shows: many accounts hold long positions, but the side with more weight is pushing the contract price below the spot price. Our assessment follows further down, along with a calculation of the price at which a leveraged DOT long gets liquidated.
According to CoinGecko, DOT traded at $0.9385 on Monday evening, the equivalent of €0.8387. Within 24 hours the price ranged between $0.9293 and $0.9644, and the daily loss comes to 0.8 percent. Over seven days Polkadot lost 6.6 percent, over one year 67.9 percent. Its market capitalisation stands at $1.61 billion, enough for rank 55 among cryptocurrencies. DOT sits 98.3 percent below its record high of $54.98 from November 2021.
On Kraken, the euro exchange, DOT/EUR stood at €0.8382 at the same time, with a daily low of €0.8293. Daily trading volume across all exchanges is $89 million, according to CoinGecko. That is little compared with the weeks before the slump: on October 30, the day of the slide below $0.91, $34.5 million changed hands in DOT futures on OKX alone; on November 2 it was $10.7 million.
The low for the year dates from August 19 at $0.7510 on a daily closing basis. The highest level of the past 30 days was $1.2577. Between these two values, the price is now moving in the lower third.
The long-short ratio counts accounts, not money. A value of 2.29 means that for every account betting on falling prices with a DOT futures contract on OKX, there are 2.29 accounts betting on rising prices. In other words, 69.6 percent of accounts are long. The exchange publishes the figure daily at 16:00 UTC.
The series of the past two weeks shows how sentiment has shifted. On October 20 the ratio was still 1.43, or 58.8 percent long accounts. By October 27 it had climbed to 2.61, the highest value in the series, while the price fell from $1.15 to $1.01. Since then it has hovered between 2.25 and 2.43. Retail traders opened long positions into the decline and have held on to them so far.
Traders regard such a surplus of long accounts as a warning sign, because it points to many small leveraged bets that would be forcibly closed in a further decline. It is no guarantee of a slide: if the price holds steady, the positions keep running without weighing on the market.
The funding rate is a payment between the long and short sides of a perpetual futures contract, a so-called perpetual. It keeps the contract price close to the spot price. If the contract trades above spot, longs pay shorts; if it trades below, shorts pay longs. OKX settles every eight hours.
For the settlement at midnight UTC on November 3, OKX shows a rate of minus 0.0132 percent for the DOT-USDT contract. The settlement on Monday at 16:00 UTC was already marginally negative at minus 0.0015 percent. Of the last 30 settlements, covering ten days, 20 were negative. For comparison, the neutral base rate OKX applies is plus 0.01 percent.
Combined with the account ratio, this paints a striking picture. Seven out of ten accounts are long, yet the contract trades below spot. Mathematically, that only works if the short side moves more capital with fewer accounts. The long side therefore consists of many smaller positions, the short side of a few larger ones.
Many accounts on the long side, but the weight lies with the larger short positions.
Binance looked similar on Sunday morning. According to an analysis by Blockchain.News using exchange data from November 1 at 07:00 UTC, 58.3 percent of all accounts there were long, and 65.2 percent among the largest traders. At the same time, taker sell orders exceeded purchases in the preceding hour by around 30 percent.
A liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged position by the exchange as soon as the posted collateral no longer covers the losses. On OKX, 15 DOT positions were forcibly closed on November 2 between 03:24 and 19:40 UTC. Long positions totalling 30,250 DOT were set against short positions of 7,023 DOT. Measured by the number of tokens, 81 percent fell on the long side.
At a price of around $0.94, that amounts to about $28,400 on the long side, a small sum. The distribution, however, shows the direction: every dip below the daily low first hits the accounts that bought into the decline. When their positions are closed, the exchange sells the contract, and that sale pushes the price a little further towards the next liquidation levels.
Open interest measures the total value of all futures contracts that have not yet been closed. On OKX it stood at $11.40 million for DOT on October 28 and at $9.84 million on November 2. Most of the 13.7 percent decline falls on October 30, when DOT dropped by a good 10 percent in a single day.
Falling open interest alongside a falling price means that positions were closed, voluntarily or through liquidation, and few new bets were added. Pressure from the futures market has eased as a result, but it has not gone away. Taker volumes on OKX were almost balanced on Monday, with $5.53 million in buy volume against $5.15 million in sell volume.
On Friday morning, October 30, DOT stood at $0.9362 in our report on the drop below the October high, after the price had fallen as low as $0.8674 overnight. Four days later, Polkadot is at $0.9385, practically the same level. The overnight low of October 30 has held, and a recovery above $1 has not materialised.
What is new is the view of positioning. On October 30 the account ratio on OKX was 2.25; now it is 2.29. The long side did not use the decline to exit. The funding rate was still positive on October 30, at plus 0.0088 percent, and has since tipped into negative territory.
In the editorial team's view, the situation in the futures market argues against a quick recovery above $1. The evidence: 69.6 percent long accounts on OKX, a negative funding rate despite this surplus, 81 percent of Monday's liquidations on the long side, and a price that, according to Blockchain.News, sits below all key moving averages, including the 200-day line at $1.03 and the 50-day line at $1.12.
Two things speak against this reading. First, the DOT futures market on OKX is small, with less than $10 million in open interest; a handful of traders can flip the rate. Second, a negative rate combined with a rising price can trigger a so-called short squeeze: the short side has to buy back, and the price jumps. So far, the trigger for such a move is missing.
Liquidations act like a chain reaction: each forced closure pushes the price closer to the next level.
The situation is a snapshot. Exchange metrics change with every settlement, and a single large account can push the rate back into positive territory within hours.
Anyone holding or planning to open a leveraged DOT long should know their own liquidation price. With isolated margin, meaning collateral that backs only this one position, the approximate formula is: entry price times (1 minus 1 divided by leverage plus maintenance margin). Fees and funding payments shift the value slightly.
The exact maintenance margin is listed in your exchange's contract details and rises with position size. According to its contract data, OKX allows leverage of up to 50x on the DOT-USDT perpetual. With so-called cross margin, by contrast, the entire account balance is at stake, and a liquidation can then cost more than the individual position.
When comparing leveraged products, look beyond maximum leverage to funding rates, fees and the type of margin. Our comparison of perp DEXs offers an overview.
For retail clients of brokers based in the EU, contracts for difference, or CFDs, on cryptocurrencies are capped at 2:1 leverage. The limit goes back to a product intervention by the European Securities and Markets Authority ESMA, which Germany's BaFin adopted. With 2:1 leverage, the liquidation level of a DOT long opened at $0.94 would mathematically only be reached below $0.48.
Perpetuals with 10x or 20x leverage are mainly offered by exchanges outside this framework. Before opening an account, check whether the provider is authorised for customers in Germany and which products it actually offers there. Our comparison of crypto brokers shows which CFD providers are under EU supervision.
Anyone holding DOT directly, without a futures contract, cannot be liquidated. For private investors in Germany, such holdings fall under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act (EStG): a sale after more than one year is tax-free, while an earlier sale is taxable once all private capital gains of the year together reach the €1,000 exemption limit. Losses from a DOT sale within the holding period can be offset against gains from other private sales. Our page on the status of the holding period reform summarises where the planned change to the crypto holding period stands.
Staked DOT is subject to a lock-up. As we described on October 11 in our report on Polkadot staking, unbonding takes 28 days. Anyone wanting to sell during that period cannot. The upside: staking rewards keep accruing without any risk of liquidation. You can compare providers and yields in the comparison of staking platforms.
(As of November 2, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Leveraged products can lead to the total loss of the capital invested.)
