What we measure
Open interest is the value of outstanding positions under the source’s methodology. It is neither collateral nor the liquidity available to fill an order. The default table sort is descending open interest, not a recommendation.
Reported 24-hour volume is venue-reported trading activity. Direct market totals can use rolling windows; DefiLlama observations may use daily boundaries. We do not silently treat these windows as identical.
Normalized 24-hour volume is shown separately where available from DefiLlama. No missing normalized figure is replaced by reported volume. A volume ratio alone cannot identify wash trading.
Reported 30-day volume comes from the public DefiLlama table. It is not extrapolated from one day. Missing observations are left blank.
Sources, coverage and freshness
The updater requests the public DefiLlama perps table and its documented free open-interest API. Direct public market endpoints provide daily reported volume for Hyperliquid, Lighter, dYdX and Extended. Direct figures are labelled with their source and scope.
Automated website access can be blocked. That condition is reported on the data-status page; it never makes an old observation look new. The initial release includes explicitly labelled, rounded public-table reference observations retrieved on 22 September 2026. Their exact retrieval time was not retained, so midnight UTC is used as a conservative date boundary, not as a market measurement time.
“Recent” means fetched within 36 hours; it does not establish the age of the underlying source measurement. An observation timestamp is unknown unless supplied. Reference imports stay labelled as references even on the day of import.
Parent and child protocols can overlap. Each API observation maps to an explicit protocol slug; public-table rows can represent parent aggregates. PERPSIZE does not sum the rows into a sector total.
Fee calculations
Fee = position notional × basis points ÷ 10,000. One basis point is 0.01%. The round-trip calculator assumes the same notional on entry and exit; it allows different maker and taker rates. Negative fee amounts represent maker rebates, not guaranteed net profit.
Published base/reference schedules are used without volume-tier, token-staking or referral discounts. Lighter and Paradex expose additional account profiles. Custom rates are user assumptions. Estimates exclude spread, slippage, funding, liquidation, transfers, builder charges and rewards. A zero fee is not a zero-cost trade.
Editorial independence
No paid ranking, hidden execution score or flow-authenticity grade is used. Affiliate links, if configured, are labelled. Order-book depth and market-specific slippage are not measured by this release. Incident coverage is explicitly incomplete and is not converted into a risk score.
Reusing observations
CSV and JSON exports include sources and dates. Attribute PERPSIZE and the underlying source when citing figures. Source data remains subject to the original provider’s terms.