Highlighting Risk: These Crypto Coins Carry The Most Leverage

Crypto leverage has been high across some particular digital assets in the space. Global open Interest in the space still sits at a reasonable point currently, but some assets boast significantly higher open interest to market cap ratios than others. Thus, this report will be examining the leverage for these assets to see which ones carry elevated leverage.

Bitcoin and ethereum no doubt still command the largest share of the global crypto open interest but when it comes to the percentage of their market cap which their open interest commands, it falls short when compared to other digital assets in the space.

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A good number of these altcoins have found popularity in recent months, spending less time in the spotlight than their beloved counterparts bitcoin and ethereum. However, these digital assets have shown a far higher open interest to market cap ratio than bitcoin and ethereum.

For perspective, the open interest to market cap ratio for crypto coins such as bitcoin and ethereum sit at 1.97% and 2.19% respectively. Each of these assets has an open interest at $15.5 billion and $8 billion. Other cryptocurrencies with newfound fame boast of a much higher ratio despite only boasting a small percentage of the global open interest in the crypto space.

The highest of these is SUSHI, which leads the charge with a whopping 10.09% open interest to market cap ratio. The relatively new cryptocurrency leads the second-highest by almost 1.5%. YFI placed second at 8.59%, with CRV and EOS at third and fourth position with 8.30% and 5.95% respectively.

Metaverse Crypto coins had an incredible come-up in the last quarter of 2021. The boom caused by Facebook’s announcement that it was rebranding to Meta has continued on into the new year, placing the top metaverse tokens in the list for cryptocurrencies with the most elevated leverage.

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Of the 16 coins featured in an Arcane Research report showing elevated leverage in some of the most popular altcoins, four metaverse tokens made the list. SAND, MANA, AXS, and GALA all had an open interest to market cap ratio at 3.29% and higher.

AXS led the pack with a 4.44% ratio, showing the highest and MANA with the lowest. Both of these are indicative of traders using both MANA and AXS to hedge their metaverse exposure.

Layer 1 tokens were not left out of the action though as both FTM and Near recorded open interest to market cap ratios higher than that of the large cap coins. FTM’s ratio sat at 4.02%, while Near recorded a 3.15% OI to market cap ratio.