# Hyperliquid Open interest Methodology

## 1. Overview

Open interest is measured as the total USD notional value of all open positions on Hyperliquid Perps at a point in time. It is utilized as a leading indicator of speculative activity and capital at risk within the perpetual swap markets. By aggregating the outstanding long and short positions across all active markets, the total liquidity and leverage deployed on the platform is reflected. This metric is calculated using one-sided open interest to establish a conservative lower bound of the protocol's outstanding derivatives exposure.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Fill and trade events covering HyperCore

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Hyperliquid Perps position tracking

- **Purpose**: Daily tracking of end-of-day positions for each trader across all perpetual markets.
- **Logic**: Fill events are parsed from HyperCore. Hyperliquid Spot markets, identified by asset names containing `@` or `/`, and Hyperliquid Outcome Markets, identified by asset names starting with `#`, are excluded to isolate perpetual contracts. For each fill, the starting position and signed size (positive for buy/long, negative for sell/short) are extracted. To prevent floating-point precision issues, position levels are rounded to 12 significant figures. A balance tracking mechanism is applied where start levels are assigned a negative balance and resulting levels are assigned a positive balance. The end-of-day position is determined as the positive balance level at the latest block timestamp of the day. If same-instant block forks occur, indicated by multiple outstanding positions at the top block, the position is treated as flat (zero) to prevent carrying stale data.
- **Key fields**: `trader_address`, `coin` (market ID), `start_position`, `size`, `side`, `block_timestamp`

### Component B: Hyperliquid Perps position fill-forwarding

- **Purpose**: Carrying forward active positions across days with no trading activity.
- **Logic**: Trader positions are filled forward daily using a fill-forward macro. Positions are kept active in the dataset until they are explicitly closed or modified by subsequent trades, preventing open interest from artificially dropping to zero on low-volume days.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `trader_address`, `market_id`, `end_position`

### Component C: Hyperliquid Perps one-sided open interest aggregation

- **Purpose**: Calculation of the net outstanding units for each market.
- **Logic**: For each market, the sum of all positive positions (long units) and the absolute sum of all negative positions (short units) are calculated. One-sided open interest is determined by taking the maximum of the total long units and total short units. This approach is utilized to provide a conservative lower bound for open interest, mitigating any potential undercounting from missing historical pre-window fills.
- **Key fields**: `long_units`, `short_units`, `open_interest_native_units`

### Component D: Hyperliquid Perps asset pricing and USD valuation

- **Purpose**: Conversion of native open interest units to USD.
- **Logic**: Daily end-of-day asset prices are determined by the latest execution price extracted from fill and trade records for each asset. The one-sided open interest in native units is multiplied by the corresponding end-of-day asset price to calculate the USD-denominated open interest.
- **Key fields**: `price`, `eod_price_usd`, `open_interest`

### Component E: Protocol-level open interest aggregation

- **Purpose**: Aggregation of open interest to the protocol level.
- **Logic**: The USD-denominated open interest is summed across all perpetual markets for each day. A final fill-forward operation is applied to ensure continuous daily coverage at the protocol level.
- **Key fields**: `open_interest`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total USD notional value of all open positions on a derivatives protocol at a point in time.

Open interest

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid generates revenue through on-chain perpetual futures and spot trading, facilitated by its HyperCore execution layer. Every order, trade, and liquidation occurs on-chain with one-block finality, enabling ultra-low latency and transparent trading. Liquidity providers and market makers earn supply-side fees from bid-ask spreads and transaction rebates, while network participants can earn governance and staking rewards via the HYPE token.

Hyperliquid is a layer-one (L1) blockchain purpose-built for trading and decentralized finance. It combines: HyperCore, the high-performance trading engine powering perpetuals, spot markets, and oracles; HyperEVM, a fully compatible smart contract layer enabling developers to build DeFi applications such as lending, vaults, governance, bridges, and stablecoins directly on-chain. Its consensus mechanism, HyperBFT, is a custom algorithm inspired by HotStuff, optimized for throughput (200k+ orders/sec) and deterministic finality. The HYPE token underpins the network, granting holders rights to participate in governance, staking, and securing the protocol — effectively letting users own a share of the Hyperliquid ecosystem.

HYPE tokenholders own, govern, and secure the Hyperliquid network through on-chain governance. The Hyper Foundation oversees community governance and ecosystem growth, ensuring decentralization and alignment of incentives across traders, builders, and validators. Hyperliquid’s investors include Tioga Capital Partners, Collab+Currency, Infinite Capital (San Juan), Optimista Capital, and RockawayX, all holding minority venture capital positions.

HyperliquidHYPE

Open interest

Open interest

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown