Dogecoin traders are putting more money behind leveraged bets even as $DOGE struggles near 7 cents, creating a widening gap between weak prices and rising risk-taking in the futures market.

Open interest, the value of futures contracts still outstanding, has climbed to about $1.21 billion from roughly $930 million in late June, according to CoinGlass. $DOGE fell almost 3% over the past 24 hours and is down nearly 70% over the past year.

The scale of the speculation is easier to see when measured in coins rather than dollars.

Open interest currently stands at 17.18 billion $DOGE, compared with 17.78 billion in October 2025, when the token traded near 25 cents. Speculative positioning has almost fully rebuilt in coin terms even though each of those coins is worth less than a third of what it was at that time.

Futures allow traders to borrow in order to take a larger position than their capital would otherwise permit. Rising open interest means new leverage is entering the market, though by itself it does not show which side those traders are taking.

The account ratios, however, point in one direction. On crypto exchange Binance, more than three accounts held long $DOGE positions, or bets on higher prices, for every one account holding a short position, or a bet on lower prices. On OKX, the ratio was above five to one.

That does not mean three times as much money is betting on a higher price, since every futures contract has both a buyer and a seller. It does suggest that more traders are choosing the bullish side even as the price continues to slide.

Those positions could become a pressure point if $DOGE falls further. A leveraged bet that loses too much collateral is automatically closed by the exchange, which means the position is sold into the market. If many such liquidations happen at once, they can add fresh selling pressure to an already declining market. Previous crypto cycles have shown that heavy long positioning during a downtrend can amplify selloffs when automatic liquidations cascade, as occurred across multiple altcoins during the 2022 deleveraging.

$DOGE, the largest meme token by market value and originally created in 2013 as a parody of Bitcoin, has long attracted speculative trading driven in part by social media sentiment rather than fundamentals. That profile makes its leveraged futures market particularly sensitive to sharp sentiment shifts, since the token lacks the revenue, network usage, or institutional adoption metrics that underpin positioning in assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

$DOGE traded at 7 cents in Asian morning hours Thursday, down 3%, making it the only major lower gainer while the rest of the market edged up.