How to read Hyperliquid market data: open interest, long/short ratio, funding and liquidations

How do you read Hyperliquid market data? Four numbers carry most of what the market tells you about positioning. Open interest is how much is held in open positions. Funding shows which side is paying to hold. The long/short ratio shows how traders are split, which Hyperliquid itself doesn’t publish. Liquidations show where leveraged positions were forced out. Read each one with price and volume, and with the others: none of them tells you direction on its own.

The ten largest Hyperliquid perps right now

Volume ÷ OI shows how actively a market is traded relative to what is held: BTC turned over 1.1× its open interest in a day, HYPE 0.3×. A low ratio means positions are being held rather than traded.

Read the market with Senpi

Senpi Signals ranks funding extremes, open-interest builds, what proven traders hold against the four-hour crowd and momentum events, and each reading comes with its source. It is in the Senpi app and in the free Chrome extension. You can ask your Senpi agent about a market in plain English, in the app or from Claude or ChatGPT through Senpi Connectors. Templates in the open-source senpi-skills library read the same numbers:

• Badger takes a break of the prior 24-hour range only when open interest is rising.
• Owl fades one-sided crowding, such as extreme funding or lopsided leaders, once it shows exhaustion.
• Pangolin fades funding that has stayed extreme for hours.

On Senpi, a strategy you confirm runs as code on Senpi’s runtime, and by default no AI model makes live trading decisions. Strategies built from a rule or a template carry the Dynamic Stop-Loss (DSL) from the first fill, and each can have its own daily-loss halt, which lifts at the next UTC midnight, or a drawdown halt, which waits until you resume it. Copy strategies carry at most a flat stop. Each strategy trades from its own strategy wallet; the agent holds no key and cannot withdraw.

Open interest

Open interest is the size of all open positions in a market. On a perpetual future every long has a short on the other side, so it counts one side: $3.00B of BTC open interest means $3.00B of longs and the same of shorts. It rises when new positions open and falls when they close or are liquidated. What it means depends on the price at the same time:

Long/short ratio

On a perpetual future the number of contracts held long always equals the number held short, so a ratio of contracts is always 1. The long/short ratios on tracking sites count something else: the share of accounts that are net long, or the positions of the largest accounts. Hyperliquid’s API doesn’t publish one. Because every Hyperliquid account is public, trackers compute it from positions themselves, each in its own way. Read it as how the crowd is split by head count, and check which accounts it counts: many small accounts on one side can point the other way to a few large ones.

Funding

Funding is paid every hour between longs and shorts. Hyperliquid’s default is 0.00125% an hour, about 11% a year, from longs to shorts; above it, longs are paying up, and below zero, shorts pay longs. At the snapshot, XMR had the lowest funding of the ten largest perps at −34.1% a year. How to use it: Funding rates as a trading signal.

Liquidations

A position is liquidated when the account’s equity falls below the maintenance margin, which on Hyperliquid is half the initial margin at the market’s maximum leverage: about 1.25% for a 40x market and 16.7% for a 3x market. Hyperliquid first tries to close the position with market orders on the order book; if equity falls below two-thirds of the maintenance margin before that works, the liquidator vault in HLP takes the position over (vaults and HLP).

Hyperliquid’s public info API has no market-wide liquidation feed. Liquidation totals come from trackers that read the chain’s trades and accounts, and “liquidation maps” of where positions would be forced out are estimates built from the positions those trackers can see. Large liquidations show where leverage was crowded; a cluster of estimated liquidation levels shows where a move could speed up.

Other numbers on the screen

• 24-hour volume: the notional traded in the last day. It sets how much a market order moves the price; thin markets cost more to trade.
• Mark price and oracle price: the oracle is built from outside prices; the mark is what Hyperliquid uses for margin and liquidation. When the mark sits below the oracle, sellers are leaning on the perp.
• Maximum leverage: set per market. It fixes the maintenance margin and so how far a fully levered position can move before liquidation.
• Fees: Hyperliquid charges 0.015% for maker orders and 0.045% for taker orders at the base tier on crypto perps. Senpi adds 0% on paid plans and 0.03% on the free trial or without a paid plan. See Hyperliquid fees explained.

Reading the numbers together: three examples from the snapshot

• XMR: funding −34.1% a year with the mark −0.106% against the oracle. Shorts were paying to stay short, a crowded short side.
• HYPE: $1.54B of open interest against $464M of volume in a day (0.3×). Positions were being held, not traded.
• BTC: $3.35B of volume against $3.00B of open interest (1.1×) with funding at 11.0%, near the default. Active two-way trading with no crowding premium.

Where to get Hyperliquid market data

• The Hyperliquid app and explorers show open interest, funding, volume and each account’s positions.
• Hyperliquid’s info API (POST https://api.hyperliquid.xyz/info) is free: metaAndAssetCtxs returns open interest, funding, mark and oracle prices and 24-hour volume for every perp; fundingHistory returns hourly funding; candleSnapshot returns the most recent 5,000 candles; l2Book returns up to 20 price levels a side.
• Senpi’s free JSON files give the same numbers for every market Senpi covers, plus the largest top-trader positions and Senpi’s read, with no key: free Hyperliquid market data.
• Trackers add account-based numbers such as long/short ratios, large positions and liquidation totals, each with its own method.

This page explains how to read Hyperliquid market data. It is not financial advice, and the market readings are data, not trade signals. Leveraged perps can lose money quickly.