# Open Interest, CVD, Funding and Liquidations Price tells you where the market went, while open interest, CVD, funding and liquidations tell you who took it there and how crowded the trade has become. ## The four numbers in plain words **Open interest (OI)** is the number of perp contracts currently open. Every contract has a Long and a Short side, so OI going up means new positions are being opened, and OI going down means positions are being closed. **CVD** (cumulative volume delta) adds up market buying minus market selling over time. A rising CVD means aggressive buyers have been outweighing aggressive sellers. **Funding** is the periodic payment between Longs and Shorts that keeps the perp price near spot. When funding is positive, Longs pay Shorts. When it is negative, Shorts pay Longs. The bigger the number, the more one side is paying to hold its position. **Liquidations** are positions closed by force because their margin ran out. A Long liquidation is a forced sell. A Short liquidation is a forced buy. ## Price and OI: four regimes Comparing the direction of price with the direction of OI gives you four situations. Learn these and half the derivatives panel starts to make sense. - **Price up, OI up: long build-up.** New Longs are paying up to get in. The move has fresh money behind it. It also means there is a new crowd of Longs who will need to sell if it turns. - **Price down, OI up: short build-up.** New Shorts are opening into weakness. Same idea in reverse. - **Price up, OI down: short covering.** Shorts are buying back to close. The move can be sharp, but once they are out, the buying stops unless new Longs show up. - **Price down, OI down: long unwind.** Longs are selling to exit, by choice or by liquidation. These drops often end when there is nobody left to flush. A concrete example. BTC climbs from 98,000 to 101,000 over a day while OI rises about 4%. That is a long build-up. The next morning price slides back to 99,500, OI drops 6%, and the liquidation layer lights up with Long liquidations. That is a long unwind: the late buyers from yesterday are the ones being forced out. ## CVD divergences CVD gets interesting when it disagrees with price. If price makes a higher high but CVD makes a lower high, the new high was reached with less aggressive buying than the last one. Perhaps sellers pulled their offers, or the move was driven by short covering. Either way, the push is weaker than it looks. The opposite also happens. Price holds flat while CVD falls steadily, meaning sellers keep hitting bids and yet price does not drop. Someone is absorbing with limit orders. That can come before a move up. Divergences can last a long time before anything happens, and sometimes nothing happens at all. Use them as a warning to tighten up or to stop chasing, not as a trigger by themselves. ## Funding extremes Funding near zero tells you very little. Extremes tell you more. If funding stays very positive for days, Longs are paying heavily to stay in, which means the trade is crowded. Crowded trades can keep going. But they also leave a lot of people who will rush for the door on a drop, which is how sharp flushes happen. Very negative funding during a selloff is the mirror image. Shorts are paying to hold, and a bounce can turn into a squeeze as they cover. Funding is a background condition, not a timing tool. It tells you which side would get hurt most by a surprise, not when the surprise comes. ## Liquidations Large liquidation spikes mark moments when leverage gets cleaned out. After a big cluster of Long liquidations, the forced sellers are gone, and price sometimes stabilises. Sometimes it does not, and the next cluster of stops is triggered too. Watch whether OI recovers after the spike. If OI rebuilds quickly in the same direction, the same crowd is back. ## Aggregated data For BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, HYPE and SUI, Market Open combines OI, funding, liquidations and CVD across Binance and Hyperliquid. That gives a fuller picture than one venue alone. On other markets you see the data for the venue you are viewing, which can differ from the wider market. ## Try it on Market Open 1. Open SOL on the 15m chart and add Open Interest, Funding Rate, Liquidations and CVD. 2. Scroll back through the last two days and label each big move with one of the four regimes. 3. Find one place where price and CVD disagreed, and note what happened over the next few hours. 4. Use the Scanner sorted by CVD slope to see which markets have the strongest aggressive buying or selling right now. _Educational content, not investment advice. Leveraged trading can lose more than your margin._