What open interest tells you
Open interest is the total value of perpetual contracts that are currently open. Every contract has a buyer and a seller, so it is counted once, not twice: a book with $9.74B of open interest has $9.74B of long exposure facing $9.74B of short exposure, by construction. It is the size of the position base, not the size of the trading.
Open interest is a stock; volume is a flow
Volume counts what changed hands over a period and resets when the period does. Open interest counts what is still open at this instant and carries over. The same contract can be traded a hundred times in a day without open interest moving at all, if every trade passes an existing position from one holder to another. Open interest changes only when a position is created or closed.
Across the 50 contracts covered here, that is $9.74B of open interest against $8.09B of volume in the last twenty-four hours — a turnover of 0.83×. A turnover above one means the book traded more than its own size in a day.
The four combinations
Open interest is most informative read together with price, because the pair distinguishes new positioning from unwinding. This is a reading of what has already happened, not a prediction of what happens next.
| Price | Open interest | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| Rising | Rising | New long positions are being opened. Fresh money is taking the direction the price is going. |
| Falling | Rising | New short positions are being opened. Fresh money is taking the other side. |
| Rising | Falling | Shorts are closing. The move is being driven by exits rather than by new conviction — a squeeze rather than an accumulation. |
| Falling | Falling | Longs are closing. Positions are being unwound, which is what the tail of a liquidation cascade looks like. |
Each row describes the dominant flow, not the only one. Both sides are always present.
Why our figure is smaller than the one you saw elsewhere
This is the most common reason to distrust a number on this site, so it is worth stating plainly: every open-interest figure here is Hyperliquid's book alone. It is the venue this project collects from directly, and it is a minority of perpetual open interest across the market. Measured on 18 August 2026, Hyperliquid held $2.68B of BTC open interest against $6.83B on Binance and $3.91B on Bybit — roughly a fifth of those three together, and those three are not the whole market either.
An aggregator adding a dozen venues will therefore report several times our figure for the same coin, and both numbers can be right. The difference is scope, and it is stated on every page that carries one. Funding is the exception: three venues publish comparable funding rates, so the funding pages compare all three. What is collected, and what is not →
What the number cannot tell you
| A reading you may have seen | Why it does not follow |
|---|---|
| "Open interest is high, so the market is heavily long" | It cannot be. Longs and shorts are equal by construction — the figure says how large the position base is, never which way it leans. Funding is the number that leans. |
| "Open interest is the money at risk" | It is notional value, not collateral. A book of $9.74B held at ten times leverage is backed by a tenth of that in margin. |
| "Rising open interest is bullish" | Only with the price direction attached — see the table above. Rising open interest into a falling price is new shorts. |
| "A drop in open interest means people left the market" | Or that they were closed out. A liquidation cascade reduces open interest exactly as an orderly exit does, and the two mean opposite things. |
Turnover: how fast the book is churning
Dividing twenty-four-hour volume by open interest gives a ratio this site prints as turnover. A low number means positions are being held; a high number means the same exposure is changing hands repeatedly. It is the cleanest available separation between a contract that is being invested in and one that is being traded.
| Coin | Turnover (24h volume ÷ OI) | Open interest Hyperliquid | Funding, annualised |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 1.24× | $3.01B | 10.95% |
| SOL | 1.11× | $641.04M | 10.95% |
| CASHCAT | 1.06× | $35.33M | 113.11% |
| FARTCOIN | 1.06× | $42.99M | 19.53% |
| TRUMP | 1.00× | $18.69M | 10.95% |
| ETH | 0.99× | $1.73B | 7.83% |
| SPX | 0.91× | $6.93M | 10.95% |
| ENA | 0.89× | $54.93M | 10.95% |
| ZEC | 0.83× | $383.88M | 10.95% |
| PUMP | 0.77× | $203.79M | 10.95% |
| TAO | 0.73× | $57.20M | 12.13% |
| kPEPE | 0.70× | $23.53M | 10.95% |
The twelve fastest-churning covered books right now. All 50, sorted by size →
Which contracts appear here at all
Coverage is decided by open interest and nothing else: a Hyperliquid perpetual is covered once its open interest clears $5.00M, and it is retired when it falls materially below that and stays there. No venue, listing or partnership influences the set — there are none. A contract that leaves coverage answers 410 Gone rather than quietly redirecting, so a crawler is told the page is over rather than left guessing. The largest book covered today is BTC, at $3.01B.