What open interest tells you
Open interest is the value of every futures contract still open. It rises when traders open new positions and falls when they close them or are liquidated, so it measures how much leverage is in the market, not which way it points.
Read it with the price. Price and open interest rising together means new money is betting on the move; price rising while open interest falls means shorts are closing. A sharp drop in open interest with a fast price move is usually a wave of liquidations.
Method and sources
Each venue's open interest is the sum of its BTC perpetual and dated futures contracts: linear contracts in coins times the mark price, inverse contracts at their USD face value, from our own minute-by-minute collection of the venues' public data. Positions are counted once (Hyperliquid and Bybit publish both sides, which we halve). A venue missing from a reading keeps its last value for up to an hour. The figures are the latest ten-minute reading of our open interest chart; the 24-hour change compares it with the same ten minutes yesterday. Venues we do not collect are not included, so the total understates the whole market.
The open interest figures on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, crediting CryptoKeyhole with a link to this page (licence and reuse).
Questions
What is Bitcoin open interest now?
Which exchange has the most open interest?
Is rising open interest bullish?
Not by itself. It means more leverage is open, on both sides. Rising open interest with a rising price means new longs are paying up; with a falling price, new shorts are pressing.
Why does open interest drop suddenly?
Usually because of liquidations: when a fast move forces leveraged positions closed, open interest falls with it. Large voluntary closing does the same more slowly.
Where does the data come from?
From our own collection of each venue's public futures data, read every minute.
Figures on this page come from CryptoKeyhole's own collection of the public market data of the exchanges named on it, and refresh automatically. Nothing here is investment advice.