Introduction to Orderbook Heatmaps

In markets, the advantage goes to those who see what others don't. While retail traders react to price movements, professional trading firms profit by understanding and exploiting order flow imbalances. Orderbook heatmaps quantify this edge by revealing exactly where liquidity exists and how it's shifting in real-time. It transforms complex orderbook data into clear visual patterns, revealing exactly where the market's structural weaknesses and opportunities exist.
This guide will introduce you to the same orderbook analysis techniques that high-frequency trading firms employ to identify liquidity clusters, recognize authentic support and resistance levels, and position ahead of significant price movements—often before conventional chart patterns form.

Fundamental Concepts

Before diving into heatmaps, let's understand what they visualize.

What is an Orderbook?

Before diving into heatmaps, let's understand what they visualize:
  • Limit Orders: Orders placed at specific prices that wait to be filled
    • Bids: Buy orders below the current price
    • Asks: Sell orders above the current price
  • Market Orders: Orders that execute immediately at the best available price
  • The Orderbook: The complete collection of all limit orders waiting to be filled
The orderbook shows the available liquidity (volume of coins/tokens) at every price level. Heatmaps transform this information into a visual format that's much easier to interpret than raw numbers.

How Heatmaps Work

A crypto orderbook heatmap displays:

  • X-axis (horizontal): Time progression
  • Y-axis (vertical): Price levels
  • Color intensity: Volume/liquidity concentration at each price-time point

Brighter or more intense colors indicate higher concentration of orders, while darker or less intense colors show areas with fewer orders.

Why Heatmaps Matter for Traders

Heatmaps reveal critical information that price charts alone cannot show:

  • Supply and demand imbalances: See where buying and selling pressure truly exists
  • Support and resistance: Identify real liquidity levels, not just historical price points
  • Market participant intentions: Recognize patterns that signal what larger players might be planning
  • Potential price targets: Spot areas where price might be drawn to or repelled from

Reading the Heatmap: Key Features

Heatmap Blocks

Kiyotaka’s Heatmap shows a grid where each block's intensity reveals how many buy or sell orders exist at different price levels during each time period. Stronger intensity means more orders.
Each block is the minimum unit of the heatmap. The size of each block depends on the granularity you choose (which we'll show later). In the example above, each block represents a $25 price range, meaning all orders within that $25 segment are combined and displayed as a single block.
Blocks above the current price represent resting sell orders, while blocks below the current price represent resting buy orders.

Block Size & Resolution

We intelligently determine a suitable value for each block based on market conditions and price ranges.

The block size directly affects the heatmap's resolution:

  • Smaller block sizes provide higher resolution, meaning you can see finer details of how orders are distributed across price levels. This allows you to detect subtle shifts in liquidity and identify more precise price points where significant buying or selling interest exists.

We currently offer two resolution options:

  • SD (Standard Definition): Choose this option if you have limited working memory/RAM or experience performance issues. SD provides a balanced view while requiring fewer system resources.
  • HD (High Definition): This option displays liquidity changes in a more granular fashion, revealing micro-structures in order flow that might be missed at lower resolutions.

Heatmap Magnifier

The Heatmap Magnifier gives you a closer look at specific areas of the heatmap without zooming in on your entire chart.

When you pause your cursor over any area, the magnifier appears, showing the exact liquidity values at that position and its surrounding blocks. This lets you see precise order data for targeted price points while maintaining the broader market context.

Heatmap Units

By default, the heatmap displays values in native notional (the base asset quantity). You can toggle to view values in USD instead.

Viewing in USD provides several advantages:

  • Easier comparison across different assets with varying price ranges.
  • More intuitive understanding of market size and importance for traders accustomed to thinking in dollar terms.
  • Clearer perspective on the actual monetary impact of liquidity clusters.
  • Simplified risk management when calculating position sizing relative to available liquidity.
Switch between native units and USD based on your trading style and analytical preference.

Heatmap Filtering & Intensity Controls

Learn how to customize your heatmap display for optimal analysis.
Each candle contains thousands of data points representing order book depth. To make this wealth of information useful, our filtering tools help you focus on what matters most to your trading decisions.

Visibility & Intensity Sliders

Two main sliders control how the heatmap displays liquidity:

  • Threshold (left slider): Sets the minimum size of orders to display. Orders smaller than this value are filtered out, reducing noise and letting you focus on significant liquidity.
  • Ceiling (right slider): Determines the value at which color intensity reaches its maximum. All orders above this value appear with the same intensity, creating better visual contrast for the liquidity that matters most.

For most trading situations, adjusting these two sliders provides adequate filtering and highlighting of important liquidity zones.

Quickly switch between Presets to adjust the balance between signal and noise on your heatmap.

  • High sensitivity reveals smaller order activity, useful for spotting early signals or subtle shifts.
  • Medium sensitivity offers a balanced view, filtering minor noise while preserving key liquidity areas.
  • Low sensitivity shows only significant liquidity levels, ideal for clearly identifying strong support or resistance.

Toggle easily to match your trading style, market volatility, or analytical goals.

Advanced Range Controls

For markets with unusual price characteristics (like penny cryptocurrencies with extremely high supply), you might need to adjust the slider ranges themselves:

  • Min Bounds - Lower: Sets how low the Threshold slider can go
  • Max Bounds - Upper: Sets how high the Ceiling slider can go

These controls are particularly useful when:

  • Trading assets with very low unit prices but massive volumes
  • Studying precise algorithmic limit orders that cluster tightly around current price
  • Needing to visualize extremely large or small liquidity values

Access these advanced controls by clicking the settings icon next to the sliders.

Alternative Visualization Tools

Orderbook Depth Indicator

Our Orderbook Depth Indicator provides a streamlined view of market imbalances as layered areas on your chart, letting you instantly spot significant imbalances, track depth changes over time, and identify potential support/resistance zones without the complexity of a full heatmap.

Delta Bar Indicator

The Delta Bar Indicator displays the bid/ask liquidity imbalance for each time period as a simple bar chart, making it easy to quantify exact imbalances, identify momentum shifts, and spot divergences between price movement and underlying order flow.

Why Use These Tools

These simplified indicators offer key advantages:

  • Reduced complexity for traders who find full heatmaps overwhelming
  • Lower performance requirements on less powerful devices
  • Cleaner chart view while still capturing essential orderbook dynamics
  • Faster pattern recognition by focusing only on critical imbalance data
  • Complementary analysis when used alongside heatmaps
  • Quicker learning curve for traders new to orderbook analysis

Many experienced traders use both approaches—heatmaps for detailed analysis and these indicators for quick reference.

Heatmap Themes

Customize the look of your heatmap in a few simple taps.

Select a main theme to change everything, or choose Heatmap Colors to adjust just the heatmap.

Mix and match the charting theme with the heatmap theme to provide the best contrast, helping you easily identify liquidity shifts and clusters at a glance.

Our themes aren't just beautiful—they're purposeful. Single and dual-color themes are precision-designed to reveal subtle patterns in order data that might otherwise remain hidden, helping you make more informed decisions.

Putting It All Together

Orderbook heatmaps are most powerful when used in conjunction with traditional indicators. Look for confirmation when heatmap signals align with:

  • Open interest changes
  • Volume profiles
  • Key support/resistance levels

This multi-dimensional approach creates stronger confluence and higher probability setups than any single indicator alone.

Remember that heatmaps reveal intentions, not guarantees. They show where liquidity exists and how it's changing, giving you insight into potential price movements before they occur.

As you gain experience, you'll develop an intuitive understanding of how orderbook patterns correspond to price movements. This orderbook intuition will become one of your most valuable trading skills, helping you stay one step ahead of traders relying solely on price action.

The most successful traders don't just react to the market—they anticipate it. With heatmap analysis in your toolkit, you now have the ability to see what others cannot.