Liquidity Heatmap

The Liquidity Heatmap draws the order book over time behind your candles. Price runs up the vertical axis and time along the horizontal one, and the brightness of each cell shows how much limit liquidity was resting at that price. It answers a different question from the chart types: Volume Footprint shows what actually traded, TPO shows where the market spent its time, and the Liquidity Heatmap shows what was sitting in the book waiting to be filled. It is an overlay, not a chart type. The chart type is what the price itself is drawn as — Candles, Line, Bars, TPO or Volume Footprint — and you pick exactly one of them. The heatmap sits on a separate switch: the Heatmap button on the chart toolbar turns it on, clicking it again turns it off, and it works on top of whichever chart type you are on.

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Turning it on

The Heatmap button sits on the chart toolbar, next to the indicator controls. It only appears on the instruments order-book data is recorded for, so its presence is itself the answer to “does this ticker have a heatmap?” Click it to draw the layer, click it again to take it off. With the layer on, a HEATMAP control appears in the top-left corner of the chart canvas, carrying the Volume Range slider — the range the color gradient runs between is set on the chart itself, without opening any panel. Two more controls sit on it:

• the eye hides the layer without switching it off — the control dims and keeps a crossed-out eye, so you can bring the picture back in one click;
• the gear opens the settings panel — every heatmap setting is reachable from the chart itself, without going through Chart Settings.

If you would rather keep the canvas clean, turn On-Chart Settings off in that panel: the slider goes away and only the HEATMAP label stays.

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How to read it

For every bar the chart takes a cross-section of the book across price. Each price row becomes a cell, and the cell’s color intensity is the size resting there:

• Bright, saturated bands are large resting orders — liquidity walls.
• Dark areas are thin book, where price can move quickly.
• Bids and asks have their own gradients, so on the default scheme the green zones below price are buyers’ limit orders and the red zones above it are sellers’. The exact colors follow your settings.

The value of the picture is in what happens when price reaches a bright level: the orders either hold, get pulled, or get filled — and each of those tells you something different about the level.

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Heatmap over a footprint chart

Because the overlay is independent of the chart type, the pairing worth knowing is the heatmap on top of a Volume Footprint chart. The heatmap cells are drawn under the price and the footprint numbers sit on the price itself, so one view then carries three things at once: resting liquidity in the background, volume traded at each price, and the bar itself.

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Settings

Click the gear on the on-chart HEATMAP control and the Order Book Heatmap panel opens next to the chart — this is the only place the heatmap is configured, and you get to it without leaving the chart. Esc closes it, and Reset to Default at the bottom returns every row to its default.

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Data and timeframes

Heatmap data is streamed from the order-book history service: history loads for the range you are looking at, pages in as you scroll back, and updates live as new buckets close. The bucket period follows the chart’s timeframe. Because a bucket has to cover a meaningful slice of the book, second and tick timeframes are not available with the heatmap on. Turning it on while the chart is on one of them moves the chart to the lowest supported timeframe automatically.

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Supported instruments

A heatmap needs recorded order-book data, so it is offered only on the instruments that data is collected for — 36 assets across Bybit and Binance, 99 markets in total covering perpetuals and spot. On every other instrument the Heatmap button is hidden; if you arrive on one with the layer already on, it is dropped and the chart tells you that heatmaps aren’t supported for this ticker. Markets marked with an asterisk were added recently: their history currently goes back about a week and lengthens as the recording runs.

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Perpetual futures

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Spot

See also: Chart Types for the types the price itself can be drawn as, and how to switch between them.