Recipe 20 of 33
Build a Hyperliquid fear-and-greed gauge from the Smart Money and Whale-vs-Shrimp indices
Read latest.smi and latest.wsi from /indices for the largest coins by open interest, average them and multiply by 100; the gauge runs from -100 to +100 and is yours to define, not a published index.
GET /v1/hl-cohorts/symbols/{symbol}/indices answers it one coin per call: its latest block holds the Smart
Money Index (smi) and the Whale-vs-Shrimp Index (wsi) at the newest 5-minute snapshot, as ratios from -1 to +1.
Take the largest coins by open interest from
/v1/hyperliquid/positions/symbols, average each index across
them and multiply by 100 for a gauge from -100 to +100. The full parameter list is on
Coin indices.
Quick answer
hours=1 keeps the hourly series to one row.
# BTC's two indices now; hours=1 keeps the hourly series to one row
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hl-cohorts/symbols/BTC/indices?hours=1"Example response
Captured from the live API on 2026-10-24 at 17:14 UTC, the whole response.
smi is the long share of the three smart rungs minus the long share of the three rekt rungs; wsi is the long share
of the four whale rungs minus the long share of the two shrimp rungs. A negative value means the first group is less
long than the second. At the same 17:07 snapshot the five largest coins by open interest (BTC, ETH, HYPE, SOL, ZEC) read smi
-0.106, -0.125, +0.340, -0.078 and -0.229, an average of -0.039, so the smart-money half of the gauge read -4; their
wsi averaged -0.335, or -33.
{
"symbol": "BTC",
"label_basis": "point_in_time",
"latest": {
"ts": "2026-10-24T17:07:00+00:00",
"smi": -0.105745,
"wsi": -0.333305,
"whale_bias": -0.196333,
"smart_bias": -0.1028,
"label_basis": "current"
},
"series": [
{
"ts": "2026-10-24T16:00:00+00:00",
"smi": -0.099091,
"wsi": -0.306365
}
],
"has_more": false
}Variations
Pick the coins. Open interest per symbol, largest first. Builder-DEX markets such as xyz:SP500 are in the list; drop the symbols
with a colon for a crypto-only gauge.
# the ten largest crypto perps by open interest
curl -s -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hyperliquid/positions/symbols" \
| jq '[.[] | select(.symbol | contains(":") | not)][:10] | map(.symbol)'The gauge over the last week. series holds the settled hourly values, newest first, so the same arithmetic per hour gives the gauge's history.
# 168 hourly readings of ETH's two indices
curl -H "X-API-Key: $VIKE_API_KEY" \
"https://data.vike.io/v1/hl-cohorts/symbols/ETH/indices?hours=168"Before you rely on it
A value can be null, and latest is graded by today's ladder
smi or wsi is null, never 0, when one of its rung sets holds no positions on that coin: leave the coin out of the
average instead of counting it as balanced. latest.smi ranks wallets by today's realized-PnL grading
(latest.label_basis is current), while series uses each hour's own grading, so do not splice latest onto a
backtested series. Which coins, what weights and the x100 scale are your choices: the API serves the indices, not this
gauge.
Ask your agent
Connected to the Vike MCP server (https://vike.io/mcp) in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, ask it in plain words.
The hl_market tool answers (view indices), at 1 credit a call.
Average the Smart Money Index and the Whale-vs-Shrimp Index over the ten largest Hyperliquid coins by open interest