Ten tokens accounted for 62% of outstanding altcoin futures open interest in the week of September 24–30, 2026, according to Talos's weekly market report. The concentration coincides with a record reading for altcoin open interest relative to market capitalization, which Talos put at 5.6%.
The report also flagged a sharp divergence in funding rates between SOL and PUMP, two of the largest markets in Talos's top-ten group, which includes SOL, XRP, HYPE and ZEC.
Funding rates split between SOL and PUMP
Talos's data showed SOL funding below zero while PUMP funding reached +21.8% annualized. Binance's settlement records for October 5, 2026, tell a more granular story. SOLUSDT funding settled at +0.010000% at 00:00 UTC, with longs paying shorts. The preceding observed payment at 16:00 UTC on October 4 was also +0.010000%, eight hours before the midnight payment.
PUMPUSDT moved in the opposite direction. Binance settled it at -0.001748% at 00:00 UTC and +0.001227% at 04:00 UTC, with the rate changing sign within four hours.
Perpetual futures use funding payments to keep contract price aligned with the underlying market. Positive rates transfer money from long holders to short holders; negative rates reverse that direction. The sign flip in PUMP within a single four-hour window is unusual for a market of its size.
Open interest value and the price-quantity problem
Binance reported approximately $1.045 billion of SOLUSDT open-interest value at 04:20 UTC on October 5, and roughly $142.876 million of PUMPUSDT open-interest value at 04:15 UTC. Those dollar figures come with a caveat. Binance's market-data fields separate outstanding quantities from their value, meaning a higher dollar figure can reflect changes in prices, quantities or both.
Under the standard open-interest definition, every outstanding contract has a buyer and a seller, with one side counted, describing unresolved contractual exposure. That makes open interest a measure of contracts still in force rather than a direct read on positioning.
Why the settlement clock matters
Coin Metrics' per-market documentation distinguishes the period a rate applies to from the input window used to calculate it. That distinction matters when comparing venues. Hyperliquid settles hourly while dividing an eight-hour formula into hourly payments, so its printed rates aren't directly comparable to an eight-hour venue's.
Coin Metrics' aggregate methodology weights normalized market rates by dollar open interest and scales longer aggregate periods linearly. Its daily series is a boundary sample rather than a daily average, which limits how much weight a single daily reading can carry.
The 5.6% open-interest-to-market-cap ratio is a record in Talos's series, but the underlying composition is narrow. Sixty-two percent of altcoin open interest sitting in ten tokens means the aggregate figure is heavily exposed to a small set of funding and liquidity conditions. SOL alone represents over $1 billion in open-interest value on Binance, and its funding has been pinned at +0.010000% across consecutive settlements.
PUMP's $142.876 million in open-interest value is roughly a seventh of SOL's, yet its funding rate swung from negative to positive and back within hours. The next scheduled settlements on Binance will show whether that volatility persists or whether the rate stabilizes. Talos's next weekly report, covering October 1–7, will show whether the 62% concentration and the 5.6% ratio held through the first full week of the month.
