Open interest in contracts, change over the last 24 hours, BTC perps, last 24 hours
DELAYED 15 MIN…Updates by itself every 5 minutes
Open interest in contracts, change over the last 24 hours, latest
Each line starts at zero, so venues of different sizes compare. Lines that split mean positions are building on one venue only.
Contracts open at the end of each bar. Read with price, it shows whether a move opened positions or closed them.
Open interest values with percentage change, volatility, and OI/price change ratio.
The 5m bar from 14:00 to 14:05 UTC on 14 May 2025, Binance BTC-USDT perpetual, from the free preview.
Step 1
Open interest in contracts changes only when positions open or close. In dollars it also moves with the price, so the change below is in contracts.
open_interest at each bar's close, in BTC (one contract is one BTC here).
Step 2
Step 3
Negative because open interest rose while the mark fell. Positions opened on a falling price, which is usually read as short buildup.
Step 4
BTC-USDT perpetual on Binance, 5m bars, 1 to 31 May 2025, from the free preview.
Each hour of May, by price and open interest.
Of 744 hours, 28% were long buildup (price up, open interest up), 22% short covering (price up, open interest down), 21% short buildup (price down, open interest up) and 29% long unwinding (price down, open interest down).
Long buildup hours moved the most, 31.3 bps on average, against 22.7 bps for short buildup. The monthly change hides this, so read positioning hour by hour.
DELAYED 15 MINto 14:45 UTCUpdates by itself every 5 minutes
Highest
open_interest is in the venue's contracts: BTC on Binance and Hyperliquid, contracts on OKX. A price move alone does not change it, so it separates new positions from old ones.
open_interest_pct_change is the change over the interval. oi_price_change_ratio divides it by the price change: large means positions moved more than price did.
open_interest_volatility is how much it swung inside the interval. A spike with no net change means positions opened and closed fast, often liquidations meeting new entries.
Open interest (OI) — the total number of outstanding derivative contracts — measures how much leverage the system is carrying. But raw OI is static information. Changes in OI, and their relationship to price, reveal the market's structural state in ways that price alone cannot.
The interaction between OI and price changes produces four distinct regimes, each with a well-established interpretation in derivatives market analysis (Bessembinder & Seguin, 1993):
| Price | OI | Interpretation | | ----- | ---- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | Up | Up | New longs entering — trend confirmation. Money flowing in. | | Up | Down | Short covering rally — existing shorts forced out, unstable. | | Down | Up | New shorts entering — trend confirmation. Active selling. | | Down | Down | Long liquidation — longs forced out on margin calls, unstable. |
The critical distinction: OI increasing during a price move means new positions are being established in the direction of the move — conviction. OI decreasing during a price move means the move is powered by forced liquidations or voluntary unwinding — fragility.
We compute three derived metrics that capture the dynamics of leveraged positioning:
OI volatility — the standard deviation of tick-by-tick OI percentage changes within an interval. High OI vol means rapid entry and exit of leveraged positions — speculative churning. Hong & Yogo (2012) showed that aggregate open interest across commodity futures predicts both commodity and equity returns, suggesting that OI dynamics capture broad risk appetite shifts.
OI/price change ratio — how much does OI move per unit of price change? In fragile, over-leveraged markets, even small price perturbations trigger disproportionate OI changes as cascading liquidations propagate. When this ratio is high, the market is in the "leveraged instability" regime that Brunnermeier & Pedersen (2009) modeled as the feedback loop between market liquidity and funding liquidity.
OI volatility spike without a corresponding price move — this is rapid rotation of positions. Speculative participants are churning — opening and closing positions at high frequency. This increased kinetic energy in the positioning market raises the probability of abrupt moves in either direction.
In crypto perpetual futures, OI dynamics are particularly informative because: (1) leverage ratios are often extreme (50–125x is available), (2) liquidation mechanisms are automatic and public, and (3) the relationship between OI, funding rates, and basis creates observable feedback loops that in traditional markets are hidden inside broker balance sheets.
When OI is rising rapidly alongside a price trend and funding is extreme, you're watching the buildup of a liquidation cascade in real time.
References:
# Install the Aperiodic CLI into ~/.local/bin
mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aperiodic-io/cli/main/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.local/bin" bash
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
# Free preview — no API key required
aperiodic open_interest --preview \
--exchange binance-futures \
--symbol perpetual-BTC-USDT:USDT \
--interval 5m \
--timestamp exchange \
--start-date 2025-05-01 \
--end-date 2025-05-31 \
--output-dir ./data && echo "Saved to $PWD/data"