A regulated US futures exchange: contracts open on CME, and, from the CFTC's weekly report, who holds them — hedge funds, asset managers, dealers. The daily open-interest leg stops on 2026-03-19, where CME stopped publishing it; the weekly one from the CFTC carries on.
20,752 contracts open · the weekly count over the daily one (close, not identical; only the weekly still prints) · CFTC weekly, BITCOIN on Oct-13 2026, the last day in this build, read from a public record, published by askthetape.com.
We use CME’s regulated futures data and the CFTC’s weekly breakdown of trader groups. CME is a regulated US futures exchange, its contracts are 5 bitcoin each, and every week the regulator publishes who holds them — hedge funds, asset managers, dealers, and everyone too small to report. That weekly report is still being published. The daily count of open contracts is not: CME stopped putting open interest in its free daily file on 2026-03-19, so the daily line simply ends there instead of being guessed forward. The weekly line runs straight through the gap, and on the 415 days where both existed the two counts agree at a median ratio of 1.0000 — not day for day, though: the average is 0.9949 and the worst day, 2021-06-01, is off by 18.6%. Historical archive fetched 2026-10-06 from the venue's public endpoint / the public CFTC endpoint; source units and gaps preserved; browser-only.
| leg | CME: the exchange's anonymous FTP, daily file `daily_volume_YYYYMMDD.xlsx`, sheet «CME Group Vol and OI by Product», parsed file by file · CFTC: Socrata `publicreporting.cftc.gov/resource/gpe5-46if` (Traders in Financial Futures), contract BITCOIN and MICRO BITCOIN on CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE. 🩸 the exchange's website itself is never touched — its terms forbid scripts; the FTP is a different channel |
|---|---|
| 🩸 the break | the column «Open Interest» is present in every daily file from 2017-12-18 to 2026-03-19 and ABSENT from 2026-03-20 onward — checked file by file over 2,358 files, not inferred from a gap. Free per-product daily open interest no longer exists; the daily leg ends there and nothing is drawn across it |
| check | the weekly leg is not a different instrument: on the 415 report days where both legs exist, the CFTC's open interest and CME's own daily open interest agree with a median ratio of 1.0000 (5th–95th percentile 0.982–1.001), exactly equal on 207 of them; the mean is 0.9949 and the worst single day is 2021-06-01 at 0.8144 — the two are the same instrument counted by two offices, not the same number |
| cadence | CME daily file (trading days): the file for trade date D reaches the exchange's public FTP between about 03:30 and 05:30 Chicago time on the next business morning (Friday's on Monday at 00:01), so the daily leg's last point is one to four days old by design, five across a long holiday weekend; CFTC weekly, positions as of Tuesday, published the following Friday — so the freshest weekly point is up to ten days old by design |
| since | CME's crypto record opens on 2017-12-18, the day the bitcoin future launched (233 contracts open, 1,088 traded). The CFTC's CME series starts 2018-04-10; the four months before it belong to CBOE's rival contract, which was delisted in 2019 and is not drawn here |
| dollars | ONE line, both legs: the dollar view is (BITCOIN × 5 BTC + MICRO BITCOIN × 0.1 BTC) × that day's close — the exchange's own contract sizes, so it can be put beside the venue page without either number being rescaled. There is no separate micro line in dollars: on 2026-03-19 the two legs were 23,438 and 22,419 contracts, $8.35B together. It ends where the daily open-interest file ends (2026-03-19); nothing is drawn past it |
| policy | public regulatory sources · no export · read on the site · not exported: the numbers on this page are a third party's |
| archival source | Historical archive fetched 2026-10-06 from the venue's public endpoint / the public CFTC endpoint; source units and gaps preserved; browser-only. |
| historical views | Browser-only historical views retain the source dates and units. |
| this build | data to Oct-13 2026 |
| policy | no backfill · no export · read it here · read on the site · not exported: the numbers on this page are a third party's |
The chart itself is drawn in the browser: turn JavaScript on to hover a day, pick a window and draw your line. The numbers above come from the last build, Oct-23 2026 21:24Z.
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