Shiba Inu Open Interest Suffers 40% Crash, What Does This Mean For Price?

The Shiba Inu open interest has hit a snag after a particularly good run. The open interest had risen quickly alongside the price of the meme coin, which climbed close to its previous all-time high earlier in March. However, the cryptocurrency has been unable to maintain this uptrend, leading to a significant drop in the open interest.

According to data from Coinglass, the Shiba Inu open interest had hit a new two-year high on March 6 when its price crossed over the $0.000032 threshold. Since then, however, it has been on a decline, seeing a near-constant decline each day since.

By Monday, March 18, the Shiba Inu open interest had dropped from its $135 million all-time high to just $80 million. This decline translates to an over 40% decrease in the space of two weeks. At the same time, the price of the meme coin has followed the same trend and has dropped from its yearly highs above $0.00004 to $0.000028 at the time of writing.

Now, the open interest for any cryptocurrency is important because it serves as a measure of the total interest in that asset at any given time. It basically shows the total number of all futures and/or options contracts for a particular asset. So in this case, it shows the amount of money invested in SHIB derivative products at any time.

Given this, an increase in the open interest can be bullish for a cryptocurrency such as Shiba Inu, while a decrease can be bearish. This is because, the lower the open interest, the less money is being put into that particular asset, thereby decreasing the demand. So this could negatively affect the price.

As seen historically, a decline in open interest has often coincided with a decline in price. As such, the present decline being experienced by Shiba Inu could spell bad news for its price going forward. The effect is already being felt with the price of SHIB dropping significantly over the weekend, although it has started to recover as the new week opens up.

To get an idea of where the price might be headed next, we can take a look at the last time that the Shiba Inu open interest was this high, back in 2021. The open interest had reached its current all-time high in October 2021, but after peaking, both the open interest and the SHIB price would suffer tremendously.

Over the course of the next few months, the SHIB price would fall more than 50%, following the same trend as the open interest. If this trend were to continue this time around, then the SHIB price may be headed for a price crash.

However, 2021 marked the end of the bull market, while the current bull cycle is only in the beginning stages. In this case, there is more demand, which would mean there is more of a cushion to mitigate a price crash.