Next to the price, and never as a side
Read open interest against the price over the same window: together they say whether positions were being opened or closed while the price moved. On its own it says only how much is open, because each contract is one long and one short, so no single figure can name a crowd.
One thing before the cases, because it changes every reading. On this site, as on most, open interest is given in dollars at the mark price, so the figure rises when the mark rises even if not one contract changed hands.
The four cases
Only four things can happen to the pair, and each one is a description of what already happened rather than a forecast.
| What moved | What happened to the contracts |
|---|---|
| Price up, open interest up | Contracts were opened while the price rose. New money took positions on both sides of each new contract; which side pushed is not in the figure. |
| Price up, open interest down | Contracts were closed while the price rose. Positions were unwound: longs taking a profit, shorts buying back, or both at once. |
| Price down, open interest up | Contracts were opened while the price fell. New positions were taken into the fall, with the move or against it; the side is again absent. |
| Price down, open interest down | Contracts were closed while the price fell. Longs cutting and shorts taking a profit look identical here. |
Every row ends in the same place: the pair says whether the market grew or shrank, never who grew it. Funding is the figure that says which side is paying to stay, and it is the one to read beside this pair.
Read it with care
- The side is never in the number. Open interest is one figure for two equal sides. A reading that names a crowded side has added something the data does not contain.
- In dollars it moves with the price. Compare dollars over a short window, or compare the contract count, or read the change in open interest against the change in price.
- A snapshot is not a trend. Hyperliquid's public API gives the open interest of the present only. Hyperkeel records it every hour, and each market page draws it since that record began.
- The hour is the grain. On an hourly record, a spike that happened inside one hour and a slow build across it leave the same two points.
- Composition moves things that are not flows. A newly listed market can change a share of the total without anybody changing their mind.
Open interest is the amount open at a moment; volume is the amount traded over a window. A market can trade heavily all day and end with exactly the open interest it started with, every opening matched by a closing. This site keeps them on separate pages for that reason.
Where to read it on this site
The open interest page lists every perpetual of the main dex with its open interest in dollars at the mark and its share of the total, from Hyperliquid's public API, with the date of the snapshot. The markets table puts the same figure beside the price, the 24-hour change, the volume and the funding.
Each market page draws the open interest over time from Hyperkeel's hourly record, with the first value recorded, the latest and the change between them. That is the only place here where open interest has a history, because the venue's API does not keep one.
What the agent does with it
Our daily pilot does not trade open interest. It uses it as a filter: the screen of the day keeps the markets with enough volume and enough open interest, with a funding inside its bounds, and drops those where its own ladder would be large enough to move the market. What follows rests on the charter's rules, once a day, and in simulation by default.
That is the honest use of the figure: it says whether a market is big enough to hold the size you have in mind. Everything past that is interpretation, and this site marks it as such.