The short version
- IRYS price fell 50% in 24 hours to $0.0414 on OKX, 87% below the $0.32 squeeze top of October 23 but still about twice its $0.0206 pre-squeeze price.
- The forced buyers are gone: Upbit volume dropped from about $617 million to $225 million a day and OKX open interest shrank from $19.8 million to $4.5 million.
- The crew is watching $0.0317 as support and $0.0499 as the level to reclaim, with funding negative again and 1.18 billion IRYS unlocking on November 25.
The IRYS price has done the second half of the squeeze, the half nobody posts screenshots of. IRYS trades at $0.0414 on OKX at the time of writing, down 50% in 24 hours and 87% below the $0.32 wick it printed on October 23. Overnight it touched $0.0317.
Yesterday we walked through how the IRYS short squeeze worked. Liquidation trackers put the damage across the whole move at roughly $68 million, most of it shorts, then the late longs who chased the top. The token is still about twice its $0.0206 price from the morning of October 23. So who is left holding the bag, and are the shorts really back for round two?
One trader summed up the fade at 01:31 UTC:
Irys IRYS @irys_xyz
> $IRYS did $1B volume on a $150M mcap. 7x turnover in 24 hours.
>Shorts got liquidated for $55M. That was the entire move.
>Ran to $0.30 ATH then dumped under $0.07. Classic squeeze fade.
>77.59M tokens unlock tomorrow. 3.9% of the float.
>Open interest
Why Did the IRYS Price Fall 87% From the Top?
The IRYS price fell because the forced buying ran out. A short squeeze lifts a price with buyers who have no choice, and once their positions are closed, nobody else needs the token at $0.32.
The numbers show the crowd leaving. Upbit, the Korean exchange where the rally started, traded about $617 million of IRYS on October 23, about $225 million on October 24 and about $112 million so far today. On OKX, open interest has fallen from $19.8 million just before the peak to $4.5 million. CoinGlass counted only about $4.7 million of IRYS liquidations in the last 24 hours, so this leg down was mostly holders selling, not another cascade.
Nothing on the project side has filled the gap either. Irys’s own X account has not posted since October 16, a week before the squeeze. A small token unlock of 77.6 million IRYS, about 0.8% of the supply, lands today for community and foundation pools.
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Are IRYS Shorts Piling Back In?
Yes, and fast. The funding rate on OKX’s IRYS perpetual sat at a flat 0.0025% per four hours for most of October 24. It turned negative at 20:00 UTC, and the 04:00 UTC payment today had shorts paying longs 0.32%. OKX’s estimate for the next payment is -0.74%.
That is the same fingerprint the squeeze left a day before it fired. The difference is size. Open interest is about a quarter of what it was on October 23, so there is far less fuel for forced buying. The early-morning bounce shows how thin the market still is: IRYS climbed 57% from the $0.0317 low to $0.0499 by 04:00 UTC, then slipped back under $0.042.
DISCOVER: Futures and Leverage Explained: Perps, Margin and How Liquidation Really Works
What the IRYS Round Trip Teaches
The whole trip took under 40 hours, and each group of traders learned a different lesson:
- The shorts learned that being right about a token’s value doesn’t matter if a thin market forces you out first.
- The late longs paid the most. When IRYS topped, funding hit the 1% cap the other way, longs paying shorts, and those buyers have since lost up to 87%.
- The holders from before the run still sit on about double their money, and the ones who sold into the spike did far better.
- Everyone got a reminder to check the unlock calendar before buying a vertical chart.
A short squeeze is a liquidity event: it changes who has to buy, and nothing about what the token is worth. It ends when the shorts run out, and the price drifts back toward wherever real spot buyers stand.
EXPLORE: Funding Rates and Open Interest: Reading the Leverage in the Market
IRYS Price Analysis: Where Is Support After the Squeeze?
IRYS has found first support at $0.0317, the overnight low. Above it, the bigger bounces since October 24 have each topped lower than the last: $0.128, $0.102, $0.0716, $0.0519 and $0.0499 this morning.
The levels the crew is watching:
- Bull case: a reclaim of $0.0499 would break the run of lower highs and put $0.0603, the low right after the October 23 peak, back in play. Negative funding helps here, since shorts would be forced to buy.
- Base case: a range between $0.0317 and $0.0499 while the volume cools.
- Bear case: a break of $0.0317 opens $0.0206, the price before the squeeze began.
The bigger date sits a month out. About 1.18 billion IRYS, more than half of today’s 2 billion circulating supply, unlocks on November 25 for private investors and insiders. The squeeze is over. What the IRYS price does into that unlock will show whether any real demand was left under it.
