Liquidation heatmap.

How this map is built — and what it can't tell you

When you trade with leverage, the exchange closes your position automatically if price moves far enough against you. The price where that happens depends on two things: where you opened, and how much leverage you used. Because most traders pick from a handful of common settings — 10x, 25x, 50x, 100x — their liquidation prices bunch up at predictable distances from wherever the crowd was opening positions. Those bunches are what this map shows.

No exchange publishes where open positions sit; that is private account data. So this is a model, and every liquidation heatmap you will find elsewhere is one too. Ours works like this: each hour, the increase in open interest tells us roughly how much new money entered at that hour's price. Perpetuals are symmetric — every long is matched by a short — so that new size splits evenly between the two sides, then spreads across the common leverage tiers. Each resulting liquidation price lands in a price bucket, and the buckets are what you see.

One step matters more than the rest: clearing. A level only stays on the map if price has not already been there. If price later fell through a long liquidation level, those longs are already gone and the level is deleted. That is what makes this forward-looking — a picture of leverage that is still alive and still exposed, rather than a history of what already blew up.

Read it as pressure, not prophecy. A large cluster is a place where reaching the price triggers forced selling (below) or forced buying (above), which pushes price further the same way — which is why clusters often behave like magnets. But the leverage mix is assumed, not known; traders close and hedge positions manually; and one large account can matter more than a thousand small ones. The map tells you where a move would find fuel. It does not tell you that the move is coming.

Frequently Asked Questions