Does rising open interest mean the price will rise?

No. It means more positions are open, long and short in equal number. Whether the new positions were initiated by buyers or sellers has to be read from price and order flow, and even then it describes the past, not the next move.

Why does open interest drop sharply during a crash?

Because liquidations and stop-outs close positions on both sides of the trade. A rapid fall in open interest during a fast move is a common trace of forced closing.

Open interest on crypto perpetuals

Open interest on a crypto perpetual is the total number of contracts, or their value, held open on the exchange at a given moment. Unlike CME open interest, which is published once a day, exchanges publish it continuously, so its changes can be read alongside price and order flow within the session.

Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026

At a glance

Measures: Contracts open, or their notional value
Binance statistics endpoint: /futures/data/openInterestHist
Fields: sumOpenInterest, sumOpenInterestValue
History: Latest month only, periods 5m to 1d

How it changes

Open interest rises when a trade opens a new position on both sides, a new buyer and a new seller, and falls when a trade closes positions on both sides. When one side opens and the other closes, it does not change. Volume counts every trade; open interest counts what remains open. On a perpetual, liquidations close positions and reduce open interest, often abruptly.

Binance's open interest statistics endpoint returns the total open interest and its value per period, from 5 minutes to 1 day, and its documentation states that only the latest month of data is available.

Reading it with price

These are tendencies. Each change combines many traders opening and closing on both sides, and open interest alone cannot say who initiated. Order flow, the aggressor side of the trades, is what shows whether buyers or sellers were crossing the spread during the change.

Common readings of open interest changes, not rules
Price	Open interest	Usual interpretation
Up	Up	New positions opening into the move, often leveraged longs
Up	Down	Shorts closing or being liquidated
Down	Up	New positions opening into the decline, often shorts
Down	Down	Longs closing or being liquidated

Differences from CME open interest

CME publishes open interest once a day after the close; crypto venues publish it throughout the day.
Each crypto exchange reports only its own contracts; aggregates across venues are vendor constructions.
Units differ: contracts, coins or dollars depending on the contract family, so conversion to notional value is needed before comparing.

In Senzoukria

The desktop does not display open interest for crypto contracts. The existing open interest data in the software concerns options, where it feeds gamma exposure calculations. For crypto perpetuals it shows the order flow side instead: aggression, delta, big trades and the order book on Binance USD-M and Bybit linear perpetuals, read for analysis only.

In the same section

Sources

Binance API: Open Interest Statistics (USDⓈ-M futures) (2026-09-25)

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Frequently asked questions

Does rising open interest mean the price will rise?: No. It means more positions are open, long and short in equal number. Whether the new positions were initiated by buyers or sellers has to be read from price and order flow, and even then it describes the past, not the next move.
Why does open interest drop sharply during a crash?: Because liquidations and stop-outs close positions on both sides of the trade. A rapid fall in open interest during a fast move is a common trace of forced closing.

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