Liquidity Heatmap

A Liquidity Heatmap chart 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 other 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. On the chart toolbar it is listed as Heatmap in the Change Chart Types menu.

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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 and footprint together

The heatmap cells are drawn under the candles, and the footprint overlay can be stacked on top of them — it is on by default. One view then carries three things at once: resting liquidity in the background, volume traded at each price, and the candle itself.

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Settings

Open Chart Settings (the three dots in the top-right corner of the chart → Settings) and use the Appearance group:

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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 on a heatmap chart. Switching a chart that is on one of them to Heatmap moves it 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 — 21 instruments across Bybit and Binance, 42 markets in total: BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP perpetuals alongside gold, silver, oil and single-stock perps. On every other instrument the chart type is hidden; if you arrive on one with a heatmap already applied, the chart falls back to Candles and tells you that heatmaps aren’t supported for this ticker.

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Perpetual futures

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Spot

See also: Chart Types for the full list of chart types and how to switch between them.