Traders are flooding into calls on ETH even as the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF drops 24.6% over the past month. That divergence — extreme call dominance against a falling price — is the sharpest signal in the current data.
The put/call ratio hit 0.305 on June 4. That is 2.39 standard deviations below the 20-day average of 0.325. For context, the 52-week low for the PCR is 0.106 and the high is 0.389. The current reading sits well inside the bullish extreme. Options positioning has clearly shifted — traders are buying calls into weakness, not hedging with puts.
Short interest tells a volatile story over the past two weeks. It collapsed 64% in a single week to a low of 0.37% of float, then rebounded 17.5% week-on-week to 0.70% of float as of June 3. That is still a very low absolute level — barely a rounding error for a product like this. The borrow market remains wide open. Availability sits at 2,397%, meaning roughly 24 shares are available to borrow for every one currently shorted. Shorts face no supply constraint whatsoever.
The cost to borrow briefly spiked to 1.27% in early June before retreating to 0.55% by June 3 — down 20.5% week-on-week. The momentary jump coincided with the short interest collapse, suggesting a brief dislocation in the lending market as short positions were rapidly covered. That dislocation has since resolved. Borrow costs remain low and are falling.
ETH only launched recently on ARCA, offering direct Ethereum staking exposure with lower fees than larger alternatives. The ORTEX short score sits at 29.9 as of June 3 — moderate, and ticking up from a recent low of 25.5. Still, with SI at just 0.70% of float and availability at 2,397%, this is not a short-seller story. The action is in options.
What to watch: Whether the call-dominant positioning in options reflects genuine bullish conviction on Ethereum staking as a product category — or simply a thin-volume artifact in a newly listed ETF that hasn't yet built a deep options market.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ETH on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
