How to read the BTC buy/sell wall

One price ladder built from five order books at once. Every row is a price bucket; the further a row's bar reaches, the more BTC is resting there. Red rows are asks — sell orders, above the mid — and green rows are bids — buy orders, below it. Both grow rightward from the same axis, so a long bar is a wall on whichever side it sits.

A row, left to right

The price is the bottom of a bucket; round thousands are bolded so you can find your place. The heat cells are one per venue, in the order labelled at the top of the chart, shaded by how much that venue has resting in that bucket. The depth bar is the aggregate, subdivided into per-venue segments. The staircase is depth accumulated outward from the mid.

The mid line

The horizontal rule is the mid price — the median of the fine-precision venues' own mids, not an average across all five. Beside it sits the imbalance: total bids minus total asks across the visible window only, in BTC. Green ▲ means more resting buy interest on screen, red ▼ more sell interest. Widen the window and the number changes — it is a reading of what you are looking at, not of the whole book.

If the line goes dashed and the price reads (held), no fresh mid has arrived and the last known one is being kept.

Things that look like bugs but are not

Hatched cells mean no data, not zero: Kraken, Bitfinex and especially Hyperliquid publish only part of the book. Drawing a truncated feed as zero would read as "no wall here", which is the opposite of the truth.
The dotted rules mark where a venue stops reporting: Past them the totals are missing a venue, so bars shrinking there is a coverage artifact rather than a liquidity cliff. The rule is labelled with which venue ran out.
Heat is scaled per venue, not across venues: Each column is normalized to its own maximum. Coinbase and Hyperliquid sizes dwarf Kraken's, and a shared scale would render three of five columns uniformly black. Compare a cell to others in its own column.
The bar and the staircase are on different x-scales: Per-bucket size versus cumulative size. Both are labelled along the bottom. Do not read a bar against the staircase.
Hyperliquid is the perpetual, not spot: It is badged PERP and is far deeper than the spot venues — thousands of BTC across its levels against tens-to-hundreds per bucket elsewhere — so leaving it on lets it dominate the totals. Toggle it off to see spot alone.
Quote currencies differ and are not normalized: USDT on Binance, USD on Coinbase, Kraken and Bitfinex, USDC-margined on Hyperliquid. The basis is normally far smaller than one bucket, so bucketing absorbs it — but a large perp basis can shift Hyperliquid by a whole row.

The controls

Bucket: How wide a price band each row covers. Wider buckets smooth the ladder and cover more of the book; narrower ones show finer structure.
Rows/side: How far from the mid to look. This also sets what the imbalance sums over.
Venue chips: Click one to include or exclude that venue. A chip showing seconds instead of a dot has gone quiet — its data is that many seconds old.
Cumulative: Show or hide the depth staircase.
Pause: Freeze the display to read a moment without it moving underneath you.

Where the numbers come from

Your browser connects to Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfinex and Hyperliquid directly and does the aggregation locally. There is no backend, no account and nothing stored. It visualizes publicly published order-book data and is not financial advice.

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