Market Level Open Interest

/timeseries/market-openinterest

Definition

Open interest represents the number of contracts that are currently outstanding and not settled for a specific derivatives market.

Details

Each contract has a specified contract value that can be described by the size asset and contract size. For example, the contract value for bitmex-XBTUSD-future is 1 usd and the contract value for cme-BTCF1-future is 5 btc. For more information, please take a look at our page about derivatives contract specifications.

Coin Metrics collects open interest in units of number of contracts and in units of U.S. dollars at one minute snapshot frequency. We collect open interest snapshots from future and option markets from exchanges that are listed on our exchange coverage universe.

Example

A sample of the futures open interest data from the binance-BTCUSDT-future market from our /timeseries/market-openinterest API endpoint is provided below.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "market": "binance-BTCUSDT-future",
      "time": "2020-08-05T23:05:00.000000000Z",
      "contract_count": "35074.075",
      "value_usd": "408810440.79225",
      "database_time": "2020-08-05T23:05:00.000000000Z",
      "exchange_time": "2020-08-05T23:05:00.000000000Z"
    },
    {
      "market": "binance-BTCUSDT-future",
      "time": "2020-08-05T23:06:00.000000000Z",
      "contract_count": "35061.142",
      "value_usd": "409113039.09552",
      "database_time": "2020-08-05T23:06:00.000000000Z",
      "exchange_time": "2020-08-05T23:06:00.000000000Z"
    }
  ]
}

• market: The id of the market. Market ids use the following naming convention: exchangeName-baseAsset-quoteAsset-spot for spot markets, exchangeName-futuresSymbol-future for futures markets, and exchangeName-optionsSymbol-option for options markets. \

• time: The time at which Coin Metrics queried the open interest data from an exchange in ISO 8601 date-time format. Always with nanoseconds precision.\

• contract_count: The open interest denominated in number of contracts.\

• value_usd: The open interest denominated in U.S. dollars.\

• database_time: The timestamp when the data was saved in the database in ISO 8601 date-time format with nanoseconds precision. Always with nanoseconds precision.\

• exchange_time: The timestamp reported by the exchange. Can be null if the exchange does not report a timestamp.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some markets have snapshot frequency of one minute but other markets have a different snapshot frequency?

Most exchanges report their open interest in real-time and for these exchanges we collect open interest at one minute snapshot frequency. Binance only updates their open interest once every 15 minutes and CME only updates their open interest once a day, so for these two exchanges our snapshot frequency matches their update frequency.

Is your open interest snapshot taken exactly on the minute?

For exchanges that report an actual timestamp that is not the time of the request (such as Binance and CME), our time field is the exchange-reported time. For all other exchanges, we truncate the time field to the minute. We try to cycle our scrapers as close to the minute as possible, but most exchanges do not allow us to query the open interest at a specific timestamp. Therefore, if you require a more precise timestamp for exactly when open interest was measured, we recommend using the database_time field which represents the time that we saved it in the database.

Do you have open interest metrics for assets, exchanges, asset pairs, or exchange-asset pairs?

Yes! We calculate various types of total open interest for assets like btc, exchanges like binance, asset pairs like btc-usd, and exchange-asset pairs like binance-btc. For more information, please take a look at our open interest metrics.

Release History

• CM MDF v2.2 on December 2, 2020: Added open interest for futures markets on Binance, Bitfinex, BitMEX, Deribit, FTX, Huobi, Kraken, and OKEx.\

• CM MDF v2.3 on April 25, 2021: Added open interest for futures markets on CME. \

• CM MDF v2.4 on September 1, 2021: Added open interest for futures markets on Bybit. Added open interest for options markets on Deribit. Extended open interest for Ethereum markets on CME. Created several open interest metrics. Added enhanced open interest deduplication logic.

See Also

Coin Metrics also calculates several open interest metrics at the asset, exchange, and exchange-asset level. For instance, you could see the total open interest for a specific asset like btc, for a specific exchange like binance , or for a specific asset that trades on a specific exchange like binance-btc.

Please see the following pages on open interest below to learn more.

pageReported Open Interest

Availability

The previous 24 hours of open interest data is available through our community API. Community data is available via HTTP API only and is limited to 10 API requests per 6 seconds per IP address. All of our open interest data is available through our professional API with higher rate limits. The professional API supports trades data through both our HTTP API and websocket API.

Availability by Market Type

Type	Number of Markets
Futures	4720
Option	7163

Availability by Exchange

Exchange	Future Market Count	Option Market Count	Start Date
Binance	207		2020-07-27
Bitfinex	25		2020-07-27
BitMEX	86		2020-07-27
Bybit	24		2021-05-01
CME	61		2017-12-19
Deribit	67	7163	2020-07-27
FTX	1027		2020-07-27
Huobi	1673		2020-07-27
Kraken	67		2020-10-09
OKEx	1483		2020-07-27