What is Open Interest in crypto?

Open Interest (OI) is the total number of outstanding derivative contracts (futures or options) that haven't been closed or settled yet. In plain terms: it counts how many positions are currently open across all traders in a given market.

Key points to understand it correctly:

• It's not volume. Volume counts every trade, open and closing. OI counts only the contracts still active at any given moment. A high-volume day can leave OI flat if most trades are just closing/reopening existing positions.

• How it changes. Every new contract opened by one trader must be matched by a counterparty, so OI is always "open +1" on both sides. OI rises when new money enters (new longs and new shorts being opened), falls when positions are closed, and stays flat when one side simply hands off their position to a new trader.

• What it tells you. Rising OI alongside a price move means new money is driving that move — conviction is building. Falling OI during a price move means the move is driven more by position unwinding (squeezes or capitulation) than fresh capital. It's often used to gauge whether a rally/decline has fuel behind it or is running on fumes.

• Funding & liquidations connection. On perpetual futures (perps), OI matters because funding rates are calculated against it — high OI concentrated on one side can foreshadow a liquidation cascade when the price flips. That's why the funding rate and OI are usually read together.

• Caveat. OI is reported per exchange (Binance Futures, Hyperliquid, etc.) — there's no single global number across all venues. Different exchanges can show different OI for the same coin.

One thing to note: when you ask about a specific coin's OI in this app, I can pull its live funding rate and open interest from Binance Futures data — but that's only that one exchange's number, not the whole market. Want me to check OI for a particular coin right now?