CashboardGlossary · Perps
What is open interest?
Open interest is the total size of derivative positions still open in a market, with each matched long and short pair counted only once.
How does open interest work?
Open interest tells you how much money is sitting in a futures or perp market right now. Every position has a counterparty, so $500 million of open interest means $500 million of longs matched against $500 million of shorts.
Volume is a different number. It counts every trade in a period, including positions opened and closed within minutes. Open interest only rises when new positions open and only falls when they close or get liquidated. A market can print huge volume on flat open interest if traders just churn the same exposure back and forth.
Picture BTC perp open interest on one venue climbing from $1.0 billion to $1.3 billion while price rises and funding turns sharply positive. New leveraged longs are piling in. If price then drops, a wave of liquidations can pull open interest down fast, because those positions are being closed by force.
On its own the number says little, so set it next to price and funding. A sudden drop usually means leverage just got flushed. Open interest that keeps climbing while price goes nowhere is pressure waiting to pick a direction.
Also called: OI.
Where does open interest show up in Cashboard?
The Funding rates widget shows open interest in dollars (contracts times mark price) next to funding and 24h volume for Hyperliquid markets, and it can sort by the largest open interest. Hyperliquid markets ranks the main-dex perps by open interest valued at the oracle price, with each coin as a share of the total, and Hyperliquid pulse splits the total between the main dex and HIP-3 builder dexes. Perps risk shows total open interest across all markets on Hyperliquid and Lighter. Aster has no venue-wide figure in its public API, so it is shown without one. Next to that sits a per-venue pressure figure: open interest divided by 24h volume. Jupiter Perpetuals only contributes volume there. Pressure is a rough proxy, not liquidation data.
Frequently asked questions
Is rising open interest bullish or bearish?
On its own, it says neither. It means new positions are opening, which adds leverage to both sides. Price and funding tell you who is doing the adding: rising price with positive funding points to longs, falling price with negative funding points to shorts.
Where can you read more about open interest?
Related terms
Last reviewed . Market data in Cashboard comes from the providers named on each widget and may be delayed. Nothing here is financial advice.