Deribit Delays Public Open-Interest Data by Eight Hours

By Elena Vasquez

Deribit placed all public open-interest data across its futures and options markets on an eight-hour delay during scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, Nov. 10, according to the exchange. The change applies to every futures and options instrument, leaving Bitcoin (BTC) traders to compare live prices with position totals from an earlier market snapshot.

What changed on Nov. 10?

Deribit scheduled the maintenance to begin at 4 a.m. ET (9 a.m. UTC) and last about 45 minutes. The platform later returned to “fully operational status,” and trading resumed. Deribit’s disclosure does not say the open-interest lag ended with maintenance or provide a removal date, leaving the eight-hour delay in place after the restart.

Takeaway: Trading returned promptly, but the public positioning feed did not return to its former timing.

Why does the lag matter?

Open interest counts the positions that remain open. Because Deribit’s public figure now represents an earlier snapshot, it cannot show on its own whether traders opened or closed positions during the intervening eight hours. Traders therefore face an eight-hour timestamp gap when comparing open interest with live prices or executions.

Any workflow that consumes the delayed series inherits the same limitation. Max-pain calculations use open interest, so their output will rest on older positions rather than the current open-interest snapshot. Data dashboards and analytical models also need to distinguish the live execution layer from the delayed positioning layer.

Takeaway: The feed still shows outstanding positions, but not how those positions changed during the delay window.

What stayed real time?

Deribit said trade execution and risk updates remain real time. The exchange did not put those functions on the same publication delay, preserving current information for transaction handling and risk monitoring while public positioning data moves on a separate schedule. That leaves the platform operational but creates two time bases within its data feeds.

This separation limits the immediate operational effect of the change. Participants can continue monitoring executions and receiving risk updates without interruption. Public analysis that relies on aggregate positioning, however, must now account for an eight-hour gap in its underlying figures.

Takeaway: Execution and risk data remain current, while public positioning analysis runs eight hours behind.

How is delayed Block RFQ publication different?

Deribit separately offers delayed publication for qualifying large Block RFQ trades when the feature is enabled on request. That option concerns the publication of specified trades, not the exchange’s aggregate open-interest feed. The open-interest delay spans all futures and options instruments, whether or not a trade uses the Block RFQ feature.

The distinction matters when a qualifying block trade appears in public data later than its execution. Traders may still lack a contemporaneous open-interest total that reflects the whole market at that moment. The trade-specific delay neither creates the eight-hour gap nor narrows its market-wide scope.

Takeaway: Delayed block-trade publication is a trade-specific option; the open-interest lag is market-wide.

What has Deribit not disclosed?

Deribit has not stated in the reviewed material why it introduced the delay, whether the change is temporary, or when public open-interest data will return to a current basis. It also identified no separate treatment for max-pain calculations, leaving users of that method to incorporate the lag without a stated timetable. The material supplies no calendar year for the Nov. 10 maintenance date.

Those omissions leave market participants and data providers without a published restoration deadline. They must either tolerate the timestamp mismatch or adjust their own workflows without knowing how long Deribit intends to maintain the delayed publication schedule.

Takeaway: Deribit disclosed the delay and its scope, but not its rationale or duration.

Until Deribit publishes an end date or revises its market-data structure, traders and data providers should treat public open interest as an eight-hour historical snapshot rather than a live measure of positioning.