OI Imbalance Overview

Open interest (OI) is the total of contract positions that have not been closed. Rising OI means more positions are being opened than closed; falling OI means positions are being closed or liquidated. It says nothing about direction — every long has a short on the other side. The common read is against price: price up with OI up means new positions are driving the move; price up with OI down is mostly short covering. This page adds up the USD open interest each exchange reports for its USDT perpetuals — halving the exchanges that report both sides combined — and lists the 1-, 4- and 24-hour change. Because the figure is in USD, a price move alone shifts it, so a small change in a short window is not necessarily anyone opening or closing.

OI imbalance looks at the same thing from another side: whether open interest is high relative to market cap. The “OI / Mkt Cap” column computes that ratio from the total of every exchange on this page. The higher it is, the more crowded a coin's leveraged positions are relative to its size, and the more forced closing a price move can trigger. It does not tell you direction, and small-cap coins run higher by nature, so compare across coins with care. The indicator named “OI Imbalance” in the screener and alerts covers Binance, OKX and BingX only; its value differs from this column, and thresholds are not interchangeable.

Combine it with Holder Concentration, Whale Hunter or the Liquidation Map.