Monero Futures Open Interest Tops $300 Million, Echoing Setup Before January Crash
Leveraged bets build up in monero futures
Leveraged bets are growing in monero (XMR) futures, and that raises the chance of a sudden, sharp price move, according to CoinDesk.
Monero is a cryptocurrency built for privacy. Its transactions are hard to trace. CoinDesk puts its market cap at $10.9 billion, making it the second-largest privacy coin.
Key numbers behind the build-up
- Notional open interest — the dollar value of active monero futures bets — has risen past $300 million, close to the January peak of around $320 million, per data source SoSoValue.
- Open interest in coin terms stands at 515.73K XMR, a five-week high, up sharply from 400K XMR a week earlier.
- Monero's spot price recently topped $600, the highest since January.
Why leverage can trigger forced selling
Futures are contracts that let traders bet on a coin's price without owning it. They involve leverage, meaning a trader puts up a small deposit called margin to control a much larger position.
Leverage boosts gains when the market moves as expected. When it does not, the margin is eaten away. At some point the exchange steps in and closes the position, in a process called liquidation, to stop the trader's losses from exceeding the margin posted. Traders betting on a rise, called longs, get liquidated when the price falls, and that adds selling pressure to the market.
What happened after January's record build-up
In January, open interest hit a record high alongside a price rise, a sign that long bets had become crowded. The spot price reached a high of around $790 on Jan. 14. By the first week of February, it had crashed to under $300, a drop of about 66%.
CoinDesk reported that the decline involved liquidation of longs worth several million dollars, citing Coinglass. Pseudonymous crypto analyst Doctor Profit, who CoinDesk says called bitcoin's 2025 top and moved to accumulation in July this year, said on the current setup: "The last Time we reached that amount of Open Interest was in Jan 2026. Monero Crashed 66% in the next 20 days. I Smell a very big Liquidation Event on XMR."
That remark is the analyst's opinion, not a confirmed fact.
What is confirmed
CoinDesk's report, based on SoSoValue data, shows monero futures open interest above $300 million, the coin-denominated figure at a five-week high, and spot price back above $600. The January price high, the February decline and the roughly 66% drop are reported as past events. Whether the same pattern repeats now remains to be seen.
What is still unclear
There is no confirmed information in the source material about how much leverage is currently long versus short, or whether a liquidation event will actually happen. CoinDesk notes that open interest above $300 million has only occurred a few times, all this year, but it does not confirm what comes next.
Why it matters
Because liquidations are typically reported in dollars, a larger dollar figure points to a larger potential wave of forced selling. If most traders are positioned long, even a small price decline can trigger mass liquidation of longs and a price crash — the pattern CoinDesk described in January.
Sources
Newisty Editorial Team covers technology, cryptocurrency, digital products, online platforms, developer tools and the wider digital economy. Our content is researched from official sources, company announcements, public documentation, market data and other primary or reputable sources. Articles are reviewed and edited before publication for clarity, accuracy and useful context.