Should ETC traders tighten their fists after Merge >$20M liquidations

After a successful Ethereum [ETH] Merge, Ethereum Classic [ETC] traders continued in their quest to profit from the market. However, it seemed that the outcome had been disastrous after there was over $880 million liquidated in less than five hours.

This may not have been what ETC traders expected but as beauty would have it, it was the case.

This occurrence might serve as a second blow to ETC traders as the price failed to increase significantly after the ETH Proof-of-Stake (PoS) transition. At press time, ETC was down 0.50% in the last hour based on CoinMarketCap data.

Much more pain?

The liquidation, however, did not begin after the Merge. According to Coinglass, ETC’s liquidations were over $8 million in the last 12 hours. From the previous day (14 September), it was $20 million.

Source: Coinglass

Despite the happenings, ETC traders did not seem to care about calming the storm. Coinglass reported that the ETC futures open interest had maintained an increase.

At the time of writing, it was a cumulative 11.54% uptick from the last 24 hours. While there was some decrease on exchanges like Okex, and dYdX, Binance led the pack with a 26.94% interest increase.

Source: Coinglass

Highs, lows, and a verdict

Recall that the ETH Merge had resulted in an increase in ETC’s hashrate. At the same time, the follow-up to the Merge was met with some trouble by some EthereumPow [ETHW] competition.

The interest now will be if other parts of the ETC ecosystem were affected by any of the aforementioned happening or not.

On-chain data analytic platform, Santiment revealed that there has been a decline in ETC across socials. According to the data available at press time, both ETC’s social dominance and social volume had decreased substantially. While the social volume was at 130, ETC’s social dominance was 1.164%.

Source: Santiment

Considering these metrics, it could be a sign for ETC options and futures traders to halt actively taking positions. However, there were some positives to note.

The trading volume on the ETC network had suffered massively, recording a 105.17% increase in the last 24 hours, and was up to $2.75 billion. On the other hand, development activity which was soaring earlier had taken a downturn from 3.91 to 3.14.

Source: Santiment

With ETC’s trading in no specific direction, choosing to go long or short in the meantime could be risky.