Talos: Perpetual futures open interest slides to $67B as RWA contracts hit $9B

Crypto’s favorite leverage machine is cooling off. According to Talos, open interest in perpetual futures has fallen from approximately $81 billion to $67 billion over the past year, a $14 billion decline. The more interesting part is where some of that money went. Open interest in perpetual contracts linked to real-world assets, such as equities and commodities, has climbed to $9 billion. A year ago it was near zero. Where the leverage went Open interest measures how much money sits in those open bets at any given moment. Talos, which provides institutional trading infrastructure for digital assets, broke down the decline by asset. Bitcoin open interest fell by about $8 billion over the year. Ether dropped by around $5 billion. Smaller tokens took the biggest combined hit. Their open interest shrank by roughly $10 billion in total. That $9 billion now makes up roughly 14% of the total open interest Talos tracks. The data, as of mid-October 2026, was highlighted by Bloomberg around October 15, 2026. The October hangover The timing matters. The shift follows the October 10, 2025 deleveraging event, when approximately $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in a single day....