CoinGlass Liquidation Data: How to Track Crypto Liquidations
Understanding where leveraged traders get wiped out can sharpen how you read crypto markets. CoinGlass has become the most-bookmarked tool for tracking liquidation data across major exchanges, and used carefully it can help you anticipate volatility and spot the price levels that tend to attract sharp moves. The key word is carefully: this guide breaks down what the data actually shows, what it doesn't, and how to use it without fooling yourself.
What Is CoinGlass Liquidation Data?
In crypto futures and perpetual trading, a liquidation happens when a trader's position is forcibly closed because their margin can no longer cover the losses. When BTC drops 5% and a 20x long position gets liquidated, that closed position becomes part of the liquidation volume CoinGlass tracks.
It's worth keeping in mind from the start that every number on these dashboards represents a leveraged position blowing up. The data is genuinely useful, but it's a record of how people lose money with leverage — which is a good thing to remember before you start using it to place your own leveraged bets.
How CoinGlass Tracks Liquidations Across Exchanges
CoinGlass aggregates liquidation data from 30+ exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, dYdX, Hyperliquid, MEXC, and HTX, among others. The platform pulls this through exchange APIs and websocket connections and compiles it into a unified view that would take hours to assemble by hand.
The aggregation matters because no single exchange tells the full story. A $50 million liquidation cascade on Binance might coincide with tens of millions more spread across OKX and Bybit. Without seeing them together, you're working with a partial picture.
Understanding Liquidation Data Metrics
These are the core metrics you'll run into on CoinGlass:
| Metric | What It Shows | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| 24h Liquidation Volume | Total USD value of positions liquidated across exchanges in the last 24 hours | A spike signals market stress and usually accompanies a sharp move |
| Long/Short Ratio | The split between liquidated long and short positions | Tells you which side of the market is getting hurt — a quick sentiment read |
| Liquidated Traders | Count of individual positions force-closed | Separates a few large positions unwinding from broad retail capitulation |
| Largest Single Liquidation | The biggest individual position closed | Outsized single liquidations can kick off cascades and reveal where leveraged size was sitting |
Liquidation volumes vary enormously with market conditions — anywhere from tens of millions of dollars across all exchanges on a quiet day to well over a billion during a major move. Rather than anchoring to a specific figure, it's more useful to watch how today's reading compares to the recent baseline, which the live dashboard makes easy to eyeball.
CoinGlass offers both real-time data and historical archives. The live feed is genuinely fast, and historical data is useful for studying how liquidation patterns line up with price — though, as noted below, how far back you can go depends on whether you're using the free website, CoinGlass Prime, or the API.
CoinGlass Liquidation Heatmap: Reading the Magnet Levels
The liquidation heatmap is the feature CoinGlass is best known for. It visualizes where leveraged positions are estimated to cluster, highlighting price levels that can act as "liquidation magnets."
How to Read the Liquidation Heatmap
The heatmap plots price on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. CoinGlass renders it on a purple-to-yellow scale: purple marks price levels with little estimated liquidation pressure, while yellow marks the heaviest clusters. A bright yellow band at $98,000 on the BTC map means a meaningful concentration of positions is estimated to liquidate if price reaches that level.
The logic is that when many traders open leveraged positions at similar prices with similar leverage, their liquidation prices bunch together. Price often gravitates toward these zones because:
- Market makers see the same data and understand that hitting these levels triggers forced buying or selling.
- Cascading liquidations create momentum — one forced close can trigger the next.
- Liquidity sits at these levels as the positions get unwound.
One thing to be clear about: the heatmap is a model, not a ledger of real orders. It infers where liquidations might cluster from visible open interest and assumed leverage. It can't see hidden positions, privately negotiated terms, or exchanges CoinGlass doesn't cover. Treat the bright bands as zones of elevated probability, not levels price is guaranteed to reach. CoinGlass itself frames the heatmap as an estimate, and so should you — it performs best on major pairs like BTC and ETH and gets noisier on small-cap altcoins or during extreme volatility when exchange feeds can lag.
BTC and ETH Heatmap Analysis
On BTC heatmaps you'll typically see liquidation clusters forming a few percent above and below the current price. Short liquidations stack up above current price (shorts get squeezed when price rises), while long liquidations accumulate below.
In practice: if BTC is trading near a round number and the heatmap shows intense clustering a few percent higher, there's elevated probability of a squeeze toward that level if upward momentum develops. Heavy long-liquidation clusters below current price suggest those levels might pull price during a downward move. The "if momentum develops" qualifier is doing a lot of work — the clusters tell you where forced sellers and buyers sit, not which direction price will go.
ETH heatmaps work the same way but often show different clustering, since ETH leverage tends to run higher among retail traders. That can produce more frequent but smaller liquidation events compared with BTC's occasional large cascades.
You can view symbol-specific heatmaps (just BTC on one exchange) or aggregated views across all exchanges. The aggregated view gives the fuller picture; symbol-specific maps help when you're trading on a particular venue and want its specific dynamics.
Real-Time Tracking, Historical Data, and What's Free
Beyond the heatmap, CoinGlass offers several tools for monitoring liquidations live and studying historical patterns — and it's worth understanding what costs money and what doesn't, because the lines aren't where people often assume.
The core data is free on the website: the main liquidation dashboard, the basic heatmap, 24h liquidation views, funding rates, and open interest. The enhanced heatmap — automatic refresh, all coins, and extended 6/12/24-month-plus history — requires CoinGlass Prime, a paid subscription. Separately, programmatic API access is its own paid product with no free tier; it starts at $29/month (the Hobbyist plan) and scales to several hundred dollars a month for higher rate limits and longer history. So the free website is plenty for casual monitoring and visual analysis — you'd pay for Prime if you want the deeper heatmap, or for the API if you're building alerts and automated systems. Check CoinGlass directly for current pricing, since plans change.
24-Hour Liquidation Dashboard
The main dashboard breaks activity down by timeframe — 1 hour, 4 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours. That granularity helps you distinguish normal market churn from a genuine liquidation event: a quiet 1h reading next to a large 24h figure tells a different story than both spiking at once. The dashboard also streams individual large liquidations in real time, showing the exchange, trading pair, position size, and direction. Watching that feed during volatile periods reveals the pace and intensity of a cascade as it unfolds.
Exchange-Specific Liquidation Maps
Each exchange has slightly different liquidation dynamics thanks to varying margin requirements, user bases, and trading pairs. CoinGlass breaks this out with exchange-specific views showing liquidation volume per exchange, the top liquidated pairs, and historical comparisons. Binance typically accounts for a large share of tracked volume, with OKX and Bybit making up much of the rest, though the mix shifts over time.
The mobile app mirrors most of the dashboard and supports push notifications, so you can set thresholds (for example, "alert me when 1h BTC liquidations exceed a set amount") and stay informed without staring at charts.
Using CoinGlass Liquidation Data for Trading Strategy
Raw data only becomes useful when it informs an actual decision. Before getting into tactics, one honest caveat: most retail traders using high leverage lose money over time, and the cleanest use of liquidation data is for managing risk, not for justifying bigger, riskier bets. With that framing, here's how traders integrate it.
Identifying High-Risk Zones
Liquidation data points to two broad setups:
Cascade trades: when price approaches a dense liquidation cluster, the odds of a sharp move through that level rise. Some traders position ahead of these zones, hoping to ride the momentum as forced closes accelerate the move. This is also the highest-risk way to use the data — you're betting on a move that may not come, and doing it with leverage is how you become the next entry on the dashboard.
Fade trades: after a major liquidation event, markets often snap back as the forced selling or buying exhausts itself. A 24h volume spike followed by fading momentum can signal a reversal.
Setting price alerts near liquidation clusters keeps you aware without constant chart-watching. A common approach is to place alerts somewhere short of a major cluster rather than at it, so you're notified before price arrives.
Integrating Liquidation Data With Other Tools
Liquidation data works best alongside other signals:
| Data Type | Combination Insight |
|---|---|
| Funding Rates | High funding plus liquidation clusters can mean elevated squeeze risk |
| Open Interest | Rising OI alongside liquidation buildup suggests volatility is brewing |
| Volume Profile | Liquidation zones in low-volume areas can produce faster moves |
| Technical Levels | Liquidations clustered at support or resistance can mean stronger reactions |
Crypto liquidation cascades increasingly move in step with risk assets generally — a sharp crypto unwind often lines up with weakness in tech stocks — so seeing crypto liquidation pressure next to equities or forex can add context a crypto-only screen misses. For deep, derivatives-specific liquidation data, CoinGlass is the specialist, and its free tier is hard to beat. If you'd rather watch liquidation context alongside other asset classes in one place, multi-asset dashboards fill that gap differently: TradingView covers broad multi-asset charting with some crypto derivatives data, Koyfin leans toward equities and macro with limited crypto-derivatives depth, and SimpleMarkets pulls crypto, stocks, and forex into a single dashboard. None of them replaces CoinGlass for pure liquidation depth — if crypto derivatives are all you trade, go straight to the source.
On risk management specifically: try to position stops outside major liquidation clusters. If you're long BTC near a round number with a stop just below, but a heavy long-liquidation cluster sits right at that stop level, your stop is likely to get triggered in any test of the zone. Either widen the stop below the cluster or reduce position size.
The honest limitation worth repeating: liquidation data is one input among many. It shows where forced sellers and buyers exist — not whether price will actually reach them. Pairing it with directional analysis, funding rates, and broader market context beats treating liquidation zones as guaranteed magnets.
Common Mistakes
A few recurring errors turn a useful tool into a money pit:
- Treating clusters as guaranteed targets. A bright band shows where forced sellers or buyers sit, not whether price gets there. Plenty of clusters never get hit.
- Forgetting the heatmap is an estimate. It's inferred from open interest and assumed leverage, not a feed of real positions. It can be wrong — especially on altcoins and in fast-moving markets.
- Chasing cascades with leverage. Every data point on these dashboards is a leveraged position that got wiped out. Piling into a "cascade trade" with size is the fastest way to join them.
- Placing stops inside dense clusters. A stop sitting in a liquidation zone effectively becomes a liquidity target. Set it beyond the cluster, or size down.
- Using liquidation data in isolation. On its own it tells you where pressure sits, not direction. It's a supporting signal, not a standalone strategy.
FAQ
What does liquidation mean on CoinGlass?
On CoinGlass, liquidation refers to the forced closure of a leveraged futures or perpetual position when a trader's margin balance falls below maintenance requirements. When you see "$5M long liquidated on Binance BTC/USDT," a trader's long position worth $5 million was automatically closed because price moved against them beyond what their margin could cover. CoinGlass aggregates these events across exchanges to show total liquidation volume, helping traders gauge market stress and positioning.
How accurate is the CoinGlass liquidation heatmap?
The heatmap is an estimate, not a measurement, so it's better to think in terms of reliability than a precise accuracy figure. It infers where liquidations may cluster from visible open interest and assumed leverage ratios, and it can't account for hidden positions, privately negotiated terms, or exchanges CoinGlass doesn't track. It's most reliable for major pairs like BTC and ETH on well-covered exchanges, and less reliable for smaller altcoins or during extreme volatility when data feeds can lag. Treat it as a probability tool rather than a precise map.
Is CoinGlass liquidation data free?
The core data is free on the website, including the main dashboard, the basic heatmap, and 24h liquidation views. The enhanced heatmap — automatic refresh, all coins, and extended multi-month history — requires CoinGlass Prime, a paid subscription. Programmatic API access is a separate paid product with no free tier, starting at $29/month and scaling to several hundred dollars a month for higher rate limits and longer history. The free website is plenty for casual monitoring; you'd pay for Prime if you want the deeper heatmap, or for the API if you're automating. Check CoinGlass directly for current pricing.
What exchanges does CoinGlass track for liquidations?
CoinGlass tracks 30+ exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, dYdX, Hyperliquid, MEXC, and HTX, among others. Binance typically accounts for a large share of tracked volume, with OKX and Bybit making up much of the rest, though coverage and the exact mix shift over time as the platform adds venues. For the current list, check CoinGlass directly.
Can liquidation data predict market crashes?
Liquidation data can signal elevated crash risk but can't reliably predict specific crashes. Warning signs include unusually high open interest, dense liquidation clusters near current price, extreme funding rates, and rising leverage. When these combine, markets become fragile and a small move can trigger cascading liquidations — but those conditions can persist for weeks without a crash. Use liquidation data as a risk gauge rather than a crash predictor, dialing back position size and leverage when conditions look stretched.
If you're tracking crypto liquidations alongside stocks or forex and would rather watch them on one screen than juggle a dozen tabs, SimpleMarkets brings multi-asset data together in a single dashboard. See live pricing →