Yesterday, besides the price, another record was broken: that of the open interest of bitcoin futures.
In fact, for the first time in their history, the aggregate open interest on all BTC futures contracts has exceeded 10 billion dollars.
According to Skew‘s data, there are 4 platforms with open interest over $1 billion, two of which are over $1.5 billion (OKEx and CME).
The open interest is the total amount of derivative contracts still open, and 10 billion are actually not that much, in absolute terms.
Suffice it to say that in the last 24 hours alone, a total of almost ten times as many trades have been made on the Bitcoin spot markets. What is certainly surprising is the fact that there has been this absolute historical record, which reveals that there are open contracts on the future price of BTC for 10 billion dollars.
It is no coincidence that this record was set yesterday, coinciding with the highest ever value of bitcoin, not least because some of those contracts are precisely denominated in BTC.
High trading volumes for Bitcoin futures
Incidentally, given that a significant portion of these futures contracts have an expiration date, on January 1st the total open interest had dropped to $8 billion from $9.4 billion on December 31st, but with the mighty increase in the price of bitcoin in the following days, it started to rise again.
In fact, the trading volumes of these derivative contracts also increased on the 2nd and 3rd of January, that is, as a direct and immediate consequence of the price increase, and perhaps also of the entry of new speculators into this market.
It must be said that, for example, the CME bitcoin futures contracts only debuted on the markets three years ago, on December 17th, 2017, so even though $10 billion of open interest may seem small, it really isn’t at all for such a young market.
