Liquidation Heatmap

A horizontal band marks a price level where a stack of leveraged positions has its liquidation price. The more yellow, the more positions. A band starts where those positions were opened and ends where the price came for them — liquidated positions leave the map because they no longer exist.

Bands above the price hold shorts: when the price runs up, the exchange closes them by buying, and that buying pushes the price further. Bands below the price hold longs and work the other way round. A dense cluster is therefore a magnet — liquidations cascade.

The color is only a rough guide; hover any level and the tooltip gives the time, the price and the exact figure in dollars.

Exchanges don't publish where open positions have their liquidation price — they only report liquidations after the fact. This heatmap is therefore a model, just like the one on Coinglass. How many positions each candle opened comes from the rise in open interest (Binance futures · open interest): that is how much the notional of open contracts grew. It gets split across 10×, 25×, 50× and 100× leverage, and each slice gets its liquidation price. A band is cleared the moment the price passes through it.

So the notional is measured; what is estimated is how much of it sits at 100× and how much at 10×. And one more thing worth saying out loud: weak bands are not drawn. There are many times more of them than strong ones and together they would fill the whole area, hiding the only thing the map is good for. The tooltip still counts them.