Open interest is usually quoted as one number per coin. It is a sum across venues, each with its own book, its own margin rules and its own liquidation engine.
Those engines do not coordinate. A cascade is a venue-level event that spills into the wider market through price, so where the leverage sits changes what a given aggregate implies.
Why concentration matters
The same total spread evenly across venues and concentrated on one are different risks. Concentrated leverage on a single venue means one engine can fire a large volume of forced orders into that venue’s book — and if that book is thinner than the market as a whole, the price impact is worse than the aggregate suggests.
It is the same argument as fragmented liquidity: the market in aggregate is not the market you trade in.
Reading it beside funding
Open interest by venue and funding by venue answer complementary questions: how much is on there, and which way it leans there. A venue carrying both a large share of open interest and an extreme funding rate is the one to watch, and neither figure alone identifies it.
The denomination trap, again
Compare venues in the same units. Dollar-denominated open interest rises with price without any new contract being opened, so a cross-venue comparison in dollars during a rally partly measures the rally — the problem set out in open interest as system leverage.
The honest limit
Not every venue publishes cleanly, and definitions differ, so a cross-venue picture is an estimate assembled from sources that do not agree on terms. Useful as a distribution, not as a precise total — and worth saying so rather than presenting a sum as though it were measured.