$1.81 billion on a single exchange: Monero open interest figures differ sixfold

Monero traded at exactly $606.80 on the morning of October 23, 2026, 6.2 percent below its level 24 hours earlier. Taken by itself that would be a footnote in a week that still leaves XMR up 9.5 percent. A second number is what makes the setback worth reading. Depending on which data service you ask, open positions in Monero futures come to either roughly $350 million or more than $2 billion. CryptoTicker compiled this analysis itself on October 23, 2026 in order to establish where that difference comes from.

Monero falls from $653.71 to $606.80: the numbers behind the setback

Over the past 24 hours the price moved between $588.46 and $653.71. From the daily low to the daily high that is a range of 11.1 percent in a single day. XMR currently trades 7.2 percent below the daily high and at 541.18 euros. Market capitalisation stands at $11.42 billion, which puts Monero 13th in the overall market. There are 18,821,252 XMR in circulation.

Over seven days the coin is still up 9.5 percent, and over 30 days up 6.0 percent. The gap to the all-time high of $797.73, set on January 14, 2026, is 23.9 percent. Spot trading volume over 24 hours came to $175.38 million. All figures are taken from the public market data of CoinGecko, retrieved on Friday morning.

Yesterday morning we wrote in this spot about a price of $644 and a gap of roughly 24 percent to the all-time high (Monero climbs to $644). The distance from the high has barely moved since, because the price first rose as far as $653.71 and then fell back below its starting point. Something else did change. For the first time in this upward phase, the move over 24 hours is larger than ten percent from low to high. That is the point at which the futures market becomes the real story.

What open interest is, and why the number moves the price

Open interest describes the total value of all futures contracts that are open at a given moment and have not yet been closed out, measured in dollars. The number says nothing about whether the majority is betting on rising or falling prices. All it shows is how much money is committed to the futures market at all.

It matters for the price nonetheless, because of one mechanism. Anyone trading a perpetual, meaning a futures contract without an expiry date, posts only a fraction of the position value as collateral. If the price falls far enough, that collateral no longer covers the position, and the exchange closes it automatically. Closing it is a sale into the market. The more leveraged long positions sit at a given price level, the more selling a setback triggers, and the larger the move that set it off becomes.

That is why traders look at open interest before they build a position. A high figure means more material that can be pushed into the market when prices turn. But if that figure differs sixfold depending on the provider, it loses its value as a yardstick.

Our own count: $2.16 billion in open positions across 49 venues

On the morning of October 23, 2026 we pulled the complete derivatives list from CoinGecko and filtered out every contract whose underlying is Monero. That left 52 contracts on 49 venues, all of them perpetuals, none with a fixed expiry date. CryptoTicker compiled this analysis itself on October 23, 2026.

The total across all 52 contracts is $2,160,336,653. Reported futures turnover on the same contracts came to $669,756,973 over 24 hours. Take that total at face value and Monero would carry roughly $2.16 billion in open positions against a market capitalisation of $11.42 billion. That would be almost one in every five dollars of the entire coin.

The figure does not survive inspection, and the reason sits in the same list.

$1.81 billion on $575,014 of daily turnover: the outlier in the statistics

By far the largest single entry is reported by the futures exchange BTSE. For its XMR perpetual the list shows $1,808,975,866 in open positions against $575,014 of turnover over the same 24 hours. That works out at $3,146 of open position for every dollar of daily turnover. This one contract accounts for 83.7 percent of the total.

For comparison, consider a venue whose ratio sits within the usual range. At Binance, $65,797,643 of open positions stand against daily turnover of $164,726,865. There, every dollar of turnover carries 40 cents of open position, roughly eight thousand times as much churn relative to the reported position.

Strip out the single outlier and the remaining 48 venues leave $351,360,788 in open positions. The two readings are a factor of 6.15 apart. That is exactly where the discrepancies you meet in market reports come from: which venues a data service includes in its total, and which it screens out for thin turnover, decides the order of magnitude of the result. Published values between roughly $200 million and more than $300 million can be explained this way, without any provider doing its arithmetic wrong.

For a holder, the adjusted figure is the usable one. At the current price, $351.36 million corresponds to 579,039 XMR, or 3.08 percent of the circulating supply. That is a leverage load to be taken seriously, but not an extraordinary one.

Hyperliquid, Binance and Bybit carry 60 percent of Monero leverage

Once the outlier is removed, open interest is spread very unevenly. Hyperliquid leads with $99,612,249 and a share of 28.4 percent, followed by Binance with $65,797,643 (18.7 percent) and Bybit with $46,717,905 (13.3 percent). Together those three venues carry 60.4 percent. Add Gate with $18,484,395 and MEXC with $16,696,129, and the figure reaches 70.4 percent on five of 48 venues.

What the concentration means in practice

That the largest single venue for Monero futures is a decentralised exchange has a consequence reaching beyond the statistics. No authorised provider in the EU lists XMR, and more on that shortly. Anyone trading Monero with leverage therefore ends up almost inevitably on platforms without a German licence. Each venue sets its own rules for margin calls and forced closures, and those rules differ considerably. If you decide to take that route, a comparison of liquidation rules and fees belongs before the first trade: we set the providers side by side in our overview of perp DEXs.

A funding rate of 0.0098 percent every eight hours: what long holders pay each day

A perpetual has no expiry date. To keep its price tracking the spot market anyway, holders on one side pay holders on the other at fixed intervals. That transfer is called the funding rate. When it is positive, long positions pay the shorts.

In our count it is positive on 43 of the 52 contracts, negative on six and zero on three. The median sits at 0.00975 percent every eight hours. Annualised, that is 10.7 percent which a leveraged long position carries in running costs alone, before the price itself plays any part. Across all venues the range runs from minus 0.0159 to plus 0.0544 percent every eight hours.

That distribution tells you more than the raw total. With almost five out of six venues showing a positive rate, the majority of the money committed still sits on the long side even after the 6.2 percent setback. Leverage was not unwound this morning. It became more expensive.

The futures market trades 3.8 times the spot market

The 52 perpetuals turned over $669.76 million in 24 hours. On the spot market, where real coins change hands, the figure over the same period was $175.38 million. For every dollar traded on the spot market, Monero sees $3.82 on the futures market.

That ratio is not unusual among large coins. For Monero it carries particular weight, because the spot market in Europe is severely restricted. Where almost nobody can buy the coin itself, the price is formed mainly where bets are placed on it. A setback like today's therefore arises from positions being unwound rather than from sales of real holdings.

Buying routes in Germany: why XMR no longer sits on any authorised exchange

Monero is a cryptocurrency that conceals the sender, the recipient and the amount of every transfer within the blockchain; the project documents the technical basis at getmonero.org. That very property has pushed the coin out of regulated European trading. A count by CryptoTicker on October 6, 2026 found that, among six large exchanges reviewed, none still lists XMR for German customers. The delistings rest on Article 76(3) of the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short.

The reach of that rule matters. What is prohibited is admission to trading at a supervised provider. Ownership and custody in a wallet of your own are untouched by it and remain legal in Germany. In practice that means anyone who wants to buy XMR today goes through swap services, decentralised exchanges or private transactions. There you carry a counterparty risk that a supervised exchange would take off your hands, and as a rule you find considerably less liquidity.

Anyone already holding XMR faces the reverse question. Selling through an authorised German platform is blocked by the same route. That is the real reason the leverage figures in this article weigh more for German holders than for holders in other regions: the futures market abroad is for many the only liquid place where a holding can be hedged at all.

Holding period and custody: what applies to German XMR holders

The one-year period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act

Crypto-assets held privately fall under the one-year period of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. Sell XMR more than a year after buying it and the gain is tax free. Within the year, an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposals taken together. That period is why short-term reshuffling deserves a second thought in a coin with an 11 percent daily range: a sale in the eleventh month costs not only the spread but also the tax exemption.

Custody without an exchange account

Because no supervised provider in Germany holds XMR in custody, storage falls to you in any case. For amounts beyond play money that means a hardware wallet, or a software wallet on a device that is not used for everything else at the same time. The decisive point is the recovery phrase: with Monero, that string of words is the only way back to your holdings, and there is no exchange that can replace it for you.

Monero open interest: $351 million is the figure that holds up

The 6.2 percent setback can be explained out of the data, and the explanation does not lie in the spot market. Three steps follow from it:

1. Work with $351 million, not $2.16 billion. When a market report puts a billion-dollar number on the Monero futures market, check whether it contains a venue with six-figure daily turnover. If you would rather stay on a supervised venue, the authorised providers are in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Check your custody before you think about adding. Since no German provider holds XMR, your own setup decides what happens to your holdings. Which devices are suitable and what they cost is set out in our overview of hardware wallets.
3. Record your purchase dates. In a coin with this range, the one-year period decides a substantial part of the after-tax result. Programs that track purchase dates and deadlines automatically are compared under crypto tax software.

(As of October 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)