Helium (HNT) Short Squeeze Sends Price Up 170% to $0.989

Weekend Short Squeeze

Helium (HNT) just delivered one of the most violent weekend moves of 2026, surging as much as 167% and touching an intraday high of $0.989 — a dramatic reversal for an altcoin that had drifted below $0.30 for most of the summer. Our read of the tape is blunt: this rally was not built on fresh spot demand. It was built on sellers being forced out. The catalyst was a Texas Wi-Fi deployment we covered on Saturday, in which Celina, Texas began turning residential Wi-Fi into cell coverage — a proof point for Helium's long-running pitch of real customers on its wireless network. Helium lets ordinary people host network hardware in their homes and shops, a model the industry labels decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN. The market's reaction dwarfed the deployment news itself. Price action came in two bursts: HNT grounded its way from $0.33 up to $0.45 overnight, jumped to $0.70 by 09:00 and stalled for four hours, before a second push from 15:00 carried it to $0.9782. The move is striking given Helium's regulatory history. In April 2025, developer Nova Labs paid $200,000 to settle SEC charges after regulators said the company wrongly claimed Lime, Nestlé and Salesforce used the network — a case that covered statements to stock investors, not the token itself. The volume behind this spike is historic. The daily bar is the tallest on Helium's two-year chart: earlier spikes topped out near $45 million, while this one cleared $110 million, a threshold last tested in 2023. In total, $248.26 million changed hands against a total token value of just $154.8 million, meaning the entire supply turned over more than once in a single day.

Liquidations, Funding and Open Interest

The derivatives stack tells the real story. Coinglass futures data shows nearly $1.5 million of short positions were liquidated on Sunday alone and more than $1.6 million across the weekend, against just $196,650 in losses for traders betting on the rise. The mechanics are simple: a short borrows the token, sells it and plans to buy it back cheaper. When price rises instead, losses grow with every tick, and crypto exchanges close the position by buying back at market — every forced closure is a purchase. That is how HNT climbed without new buyers arriving; traders call it a short squeeze. Funding rates, the periodic fee one side pays the other on perpetual markets, confirm the imbalance. That fee had sat flat at zero for eight months; this weekend a single payment fell past minus 1.2%, meaning shorts now pay longs to stay in their positions. One trader on X noted that funding on Bybit's HNT-PERP printed close to -1,000% on its latest reading, describing a trapped short crowd with almost no spot supply to cover into. Open interest — the total capital riding on open long and short contracts — jumped 197.6% to $13.64 million, its highest in roughly a year. Closed bets here are being replaced faster than they are cleared out, a pattern that typically signals aggressive, high-conviction leveraged demand. Traders picking a venue for such volatile perpetuals can compare options in our guide to the best crypto exchanges. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Funding Reset in Focus

The squeeze is already cooling: HNT peaked at $0.989 and now trades near $0.88, with only $22,920 of bearish bets closed in the most recent hour against $1.61 million across the day. In our analysis, two gauges matter from here. First, open interest: a vertical spike is a warning rather than an entry, and the signal to wait for is OI flattening while price holds — evidence the market has accepted the higher level rather than merely leveraged into it. Second, funding: HNT reads in reverse of the usual case, so deeply negative funding means the crowd is still short and paying to stay there. A return toward zero ends the forced-buying engine, and ordinary demand must hold the price alone. One supply point favors holders: every HNT minted so far already trades, so no vesting block awaits — circulating supply continues toward the 223 million cap, with about 37 million still to come. Anyone buying now is betting on a second squeeze, not riding the first.