Open Interest

Bitcoin open interest plots the total USD notional of outstanding Bitcoin futures contracts each day, stacked by venue. Each band in the area is one venue’s contribution; the thin line at the top is the aggregate. The y-axis runs on a logarithmic ruler so the pre-2022 era at roughly $3B stays legible against the modern scale around $59B. A muted Bitcoin price line sits behind for cycle context.

Today’s aggregate is $58.63B — Leveraged on the OI/market-cap regime. The top three venues by current notional are Binance, CME, MEXC; the regulated leg sits at 14.8% of the stack, a share that has roughly tripled since the spot-ETF approvals in early 2024. The figure refreshes overnight; spot auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser.

Two inputs flow in: each venue’s reported USD open interest at the daily close, and the deterministic Bitcoin circulating supply on that day. Provenance is documented on the data sources page; the per-venue normalisation and the OI/market-cap derivation are spelled out on methodology. Three computations:

OI_total(t) = Σv OI_v(t) across the venues we cover, with the residual outside the top five rolled into a single Other bucket so the stack stays legible.
market_cap(t) = price(t) × circulating_supply(t), where circulating supply is the closed-form value at block-height t — no pricing-feed dependency.
OI/mcap(t) = OI_total(t) / market_cap(t) — the leverage-vs-spot proxy that drives the regime classifier.

Two reconstruction notes. First, OI is reported in three equivalent forms across venues — contract count, USD notional, coin notional — and a coin-margined contract’s USD value moves with spot even when no new contracts are opened. We pull USD notional everywhere we can, and accept that on coin-margined exposure the dollar reading carries a small mechanical price-sensitivity. Second, regime thresholds are OI/mcap > 2.5% for “Leveraged” and < 1.5% for “Deleveraged.” They are descriptive cuts on the post-2020 distribution, not bright lines — the indicator’s content is the regime, not the sharp threshold.

The distinction worth holding onto: open interest is a stock measured at instant t, volume is a flow measured over interval [t−1, t]. They answer different questions and behave differently in a flush. A leveraged blow-off can show falling OI (positions closing) and exploding volume (closures producing trades) on the same day. The two are not interchangeable.

The instructive read pairs OI with price simultaneously, in a four-quadrant frame. The cleanest published version sits in a July 2025 leveraged-positioning research note, which describes the four cells: When price and OI rise together, traders are adding long exposure into an upward trend (long opens); A declining price with increasing OI suggests traders are opening short positions; A simultaneous drop in both price and OI indicates long positions are being closed; Rising prices alongside falling OI point to short positions being exited. Mapping every cycle move to one of those four cells is the core read this chart supports.

Seven anchors since the start of our daily series sketch the cycle. Aggregate open interest has compounded from the COVID flush at roughly $3B to the post-ETF era above $50B; the path between them is the cycle. Spot prices are nightly closes from our pipeline; OI cells are pulled from the same daily snapshot powering the chart.

The cleanest case study in the series sits across two rows of the table above. On 2022-11-08, the day before FTX paused withdrawals, aggregate OI sat at roughly $13.1B. By 2022-11-30 — three weeks after the Chapter 11 filing — total OI had fallen to $10.6B. The instinctive read is “market deleveraged twenty percent.” That is the wrong frame. The missing notional did not unwind — the venue carrying it disappeared. Positions on the FTX perpetual book were socialised into the bankruptcy estate; aggregator totals stepped down because one of the cells went to zero, not because every other venue’s holders closed out.

The post-FTX Alameda Gap analysis put FTX’s peak derivatives market share at around 15%; the share didn’t drift, it disappeared in one weekend. Surviving venues absorbed the flow over the following months — the aggregate climbed back through the 2023 banking-crisis chop and into the spot-ETF approvals — but the November 2022 step is the cleanest reminder that aggregate open interest is not a neutral leverage gauge across venue regimes.

The composition of the stack changed permanently after the January 2024 spot-ETF approvals. Through the 2021 cycle the largest band in the stack was an offshore perpetual venue; the regulated futures leg sat third or fourth. By November 2024 the regulated leg had crossed 218,000 BTC ($21.3B) of OI — first time at that scale — and the cycle’s top of the stack runs there consistently. Today the regulated venue’s share of total open interest sits at 14.8% — roughly triple its pre-ETF share.

That flip matters for how you read the chart. A 2021-era $24B total OI was retail-led, dominated by unregulated leverage with weekly liquidation cascades. The post-ETF $59B is structurally different — a third of it sits inside cash-settled, compliant exposure that does not produce the same weekend wicks. The OI/mcap ratio reads broadly the same numbers cycle to cycle, but the volatility a given reading produces has fallen as the regulated band has thickened. A read of open interest that ignores the composition shift is reporting last cycle’s indicator on this cycle’s book.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Use the OI/mcap ratio as a coarse leverage gauge. Above 2.5% the chart is “Leveraged,” the regime where wicks have been violent — nothing to do with cadence, but a reminder that intraday spot can be misleading. Below 1.5% it is “Deleveraged,” the regime where rallies grind. The bands move on the order of weeks; daily readings are noise.

For a cycle-timing trader. The four-quadrant phase diagram is the page. Locate today on it — using the price change and the OI change together — and treat the cell as a regime, not a trade. Pair with funding rate for the price of crowded leverage and the liquidation heatmap for the geometry of forced flow. Long-side exhaustion in the “long openings” cell with positive funding north of +0.05% per 8h is the canonical leverage-flush precursor.

For a researcher. Every line in the stack reproduces from the per-venue daily series. The methodology page documents the venue-list rotation, the “Other” bucket policy, the OI/mcap derivation, and the gaps in coverage on dates where one or more venues failed to report.

Aggregator coverage drift. The list of venues we report is not static. New venues become material; older ones fade. The post-2020 stack adds coverage faster than any cyclical signal moves, so the absolute total carries a slow upward bias purely from coverage expansion. The OI/mcap ratio absorbs most of that bias because both numerator and denominator grow with the book, but the per-venue stack does not. Treat year-over-year totals carefully.

Venue discontinuity. November 2022 is the clean example — aggregate OI fell because a venue disappeared, not because positions closed. A read of the November 8th total against the November 30th total records that as a 19% deleverage; the Alameda Gap research shows that figure conflates two unrelated things. Whenever the stack has a step-change in venue composition, treat the total as discontinuous.

Coin-margined contracts move with spot. A non-trivial slice of perpetual OI is coin-margined — quoted in BTC notional, displayed in USD after multiplying by current spot. On those contracts, USD-denominated OI moves mechanically with price even if no new contracts opened or closed. In a sharp drawdown, coin-margined OI will appear to fall faster than the actual position count drops, exaggerating the “deleveraging” visible on the chart. The effect is small in normal markets and large during liquidations.

Canonical questions readers bring to open interest, answered against the daily series powering this page.