BTC CME Futures Open Interest (weekly): 19.7K
How many bitcoin futures contracts are open and unsettled at the Chicago exchange, and how much bitcoin sits behind them. This is the regulated venue American funds use. A free daily figure does not exist, so this is the regulator's weekly one.
An open contract is a futures bet that has been entered and not yet closed or expired. This counts every one of them on the CME bitcoin future on report day.
The second line is the same number multiplied by 5 bitcoin, the size of one contract, so you can see the position in coins.
Rising open interest means more money is being committed to the regulated futures market — either fresh directional bets or more basis trade. In the report for 21 July 2026 there were 20,527 open contracts, which is 102,635 bitcoin.
Compare it with the OI by Exchange chart, which measures Binance and Bybit in the same coin units: the CME figure is far smaller, and that difference is the point — CME is where regulated American money sits, the offshore venues are where the leverage sits. A drop of several thousand contracts in one week is usually expiry rather than panic; CME bitcoin futures settle on the last Friday of the month.
Total open interest for the CME bitcoin contract, taken as the CFTC publishes it. Bitcoin equivalent = contracts × 5, the exact contract size written into the CME specification — a definition, not an estimate.
WEEKLY, and it is the CFTC's count at Tuesday's close, not CME's own daily number. CME does publish daily volume and open interest, but not in any free machine-readable form we may use: every public cmegroup.com endpoint we tried answers HTTP 403 with a notice that scripted access is barred by their Data Terms of Use, DataMine needs a licensed account, and the free mirrors either block automated reads or carry **only** the front-month contract. So we publish the weekly regulator figure and label it weekly instead of inventing a daily line, and there is no CME VOLUME chart on this site for the same reason.
The 5-bitcoin contract only — Micro Bitcoin futures are excluded. History starts 10 April 2018.
CFTC Public Reporting Environment, 'Traders in Financial Futures — Futures Only' (Socrata dataset gpe5-46if), contract BITCOIN — CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE, market code 133741, field open_interest_all. Free public data, no key.
CFTC Commitments of Traders · free public data · 1 point per WEEK (Tuesday positions, published Friday) · full history since 2018-04-10