Order flow: CVD, open interest, funding and liquidations

Candles show where the price went. Order flow shows who pushed it there. These tools are part of the Pro and Elite plans and work on crypto perpetual markets; CVD, the footprint and the trade bubbles also work on spot markets.

The order-flow toolbox

Open it from the chart toolbar and switch on the tools you want:

• CVD (cumulative volume delta): the running difference between aggressive buying and selling. A rising price with falling CVD can be a warning.
• Net position: whether traders are adding long or short positions.
• Funding: the rate longs and shorts pay each other. Very high funding means a crowded long side.
• Open interest: how much money is in open positions. Price rising with open interest rising means new money is entering. Show it in coins or in dollars from the gear on its panel or in the toolbox.
• Trade bubbles: the large trades recorded on Binance (spot and perpetual, from $100,000) on the bars they hit, one bubble per side and price, bigger for bigger trades. The size follows the coin and timeframe or your own setting; point at a bubble for its total, price and number of trades.
• Liquidation heatmap: price areas where many positions would be forced to close.
• Footprint: inside each candle, how much was bought and sold at every price, with the busiest price and strongly one-sided prices highlighted. It works on 1-minute to 4-hour charts of the most traded Binance markets. Zoomed out, when the cells are too small for their numbers, a magnifier beside the cursor shows the hovered candle's rows (it can be turned off in the footprint settings).

Each tool can be made more or less sensitive.

Reading the footprint

• Each candle is split into price rows: sells on the left, buys on the right; a stronger colour means more volume.
• The outlined row is the price where the most volume traded in that candle.
• A bold number is an imbalance: one side traded at least three times the other side one row away. Change the ratio in the settings.
• The number under a candle is its delta, buys minus sells. A dimmed candle with a dash is missing some trades. Zoom in to see the numbers; the chart shows where the footprint history starts.
• The gear opens the footprint's own settings. Show each row as bid × ask, as its delta, as its volume or as a volume profile of the candle; choose the statistics under each candle (volume, buys, sells, delta, delta %, cumulative delta for the UTC day, POC price, range, delta change, volume above and below the POC); mark stacked imbalances and extend the ones price has not come back to; paint the cells that pass your own rules, such as sell volume above 500; and show the figures in coins or dollars. Classic, Delta and Profile set it all up in one click.

Aggregated indicators

Under Aggregated (all venues), the toolbox has five more panels. Each one adds up a coin's order flow on Binance, Bybit, OKX, Coinbase and Hyperliquid, so you see the market across exchanges rather than on one.

• Agg. CVD: buying minus selling, added up across the exchanges. For markets, choose perpetuals (the default), spot, both added together, or Separate: perpetuals and spot as two lines in the same panel, each with its own running total. Show it as a line or candles, in coins or approximate dollars (each bar's delta times its price). It can start again every day, every week (on Monday) or every month in UTC, or never reset. By default it begins with the first exchange that has data, and a small mark such as +BYBIT shows where another one joins: the line keeps its level and only its slope changes. You can also start it once every exchange has data.
• Agg. Open Interest: total open interest as candles, in coins or dollars. Each candle opens at the previous close; its high and low are the highest and lowest total, checked every 5 minutes, or every hour on 1-hour and longer charts. By default it starts from the first exchange with data, and the history before each later exchange joins is scaled by the jump that join causes, so there is no step. That part is an estimate, and each join is marked. It can also start once every large exchange has data, so a late exchange does not look like a sudden jump; an exchange holding less than 2% of the total then joins later with a mark instead of moving the start. Or it can start from the first exchange with data without scaling, where the level steps up as each one joins.
• Agg. Funding: the funding rate averaged across the exchanges, weighted by each one's open interest, or a simple average. Exchanges pay funding every 1, 4 or 8 hours, so each rate is first converted to the same period. Show it per hour, per 8 hours (the default), per day or per year (APR), as bars or a line. Until open interest is known, a simple average is used.
• Agg. Net Long / Short: estimated net longs (NL) and net shorts (NS). Each exchange is worked out the same way as in the Net position panel, and the results are added up. These are estimates, not reported positions. Coinbase is left out, because it reports its open interest only once a day. It is not available on the weekly chart, and Hyperliquid counts from the 5-minute chart up.
• Agg. Liquidations: long and short liquidations on Binance, Bybit and OKX over the last 30 days, in dollars or coins. Coinbase and Hyperliquid publish none. Long liquidations are drawn below zero unless you turn that off. Binance publishes at most one liquidation per market per second, so its share is a minimum.

All five work the same way:

• Each exchange is a logo in the panel header. Click it to leave the exchange out or bring it back. Grey means off, faded means no data for this coin, and "!" means its data could not be loaded. The same switches are under Venues in the gear settings.
• Hover over a logo to see the exchange's pair, the date its data starts and its value under the crosshair.
• The header shows the value and how many exchanges are counted, for example 4/5 venues.
• Amounts are in the coin itself: 1000PEPE contracts count as PEPE.
• Every exchange starts switched on. Turn any of them off from its logo or in the gear settings.
• Missing data never counts as zero. An exchange whose data starts later joins from that point.

They are part of the Pro and Elite plans and work on crypto spot and perpetual charts, but not on stocks, forex, CME futures, tick charts or range bars. On a spot chart, open interest, funding, net long/short and liquidations come from the coin's perpetual markets.

Liquidations panel

A live list of forced closings: side, symbol, price and size. Filter by minimum size and see the total, the largest liquidation and the long/short balance.

Funding panel

A countdown to the next funding payment, the most positive and most negative rates, and a searchable list of every market with its funding, mark price and open interest.

Level 2 order book

The waiting buy and sell orders at each price, so you can see where large orders are sitting. Under the book, the value resting within ±0.5, 1 or 2% of the mid on each side and how lopsided it is (tap the band to change it). The recent trades open a Trade Pulse: over the last 1, 5 or 15 minutes, trades per second, the count, the buy against sell value, the delta, the large prints and a small delta strip, from the tape the panel receives while it is open.

AGGR: live trades from many exchanges

AGGR combines the trades of several exchanges into one live tape and chart, so you can see where large buyers and sellers are active.

Reading them together

No single tool is a signal on its own. The strongest reads come from agreement: price, CVD and open interest rising together is healthier than price rising alone on falling CVD.

Alerts on order flow

With Pro and Elite you can be alerted when net buying, open interest, funding or liquidations pass a level you choose, on one exchange or all of them together, without a script: choose "Order flow" in the alert window. The alerts article lists every option.