Question 1

What is a footprint chart?

Accepted Answer

A regular candle gives you four prices and one volume number: whether the last 15 minutes closed up or down, and how much traded. It can't tell you who was buying, who was selling, or which price traded the most.
A footprint chart (also called an order flow chart or bid/ask footprint) slices each candle into price levels and prints two numbers at every level: on the left, the volume sold aggressively at that price; on the right, the volume bought aggressively. Futures traders have long used it for order flow analysis, and it reads the same way on BTC, ETH and other crypto perps and spot pairs.
Aggressive means the taker side of a trade. A market buy that lifts the offer is a taker buy; a market sell that hits the bid is a taker sell. Makers, whose limit orders rest on the book waiting to be filled, don't count. Price moves because someone is willing to pay the spread to get filled right now.
Say a strong green candle closes near its high. Break it open and the top few levels show almost no taker buying, while most of the volume sits in the lower half of the bar. Nobody chased the last leg up; it was probably shorts getting stopped out, and the move may not have much left. A plain candle can't tell you that.

Question 2

How do you read the numbers on a footprint chart?

Accepted Answer

Each level reads Bid × Ask. The left number is volume that traded at the bid, meaning taker sells; the right number is volume that traded at the ask, meaning taker buys.
The "Coin / USD" toggle in the toolbar switches units. When cells get narrow, numbers are shortened to 52, 5.2, .45 or 1.2K. Narrower still, each cell shows a single number: bid and ask combined (in Avg size mode, the average trade size of both sides). Hover a cell to see the exact figure.

Question 3

What do the colors on a footprint chart mean?

Accepted Answer

Each cell is colored by the side that traded more at that price: green when buys dominate, red when sells dominate, gray when the two are within 10% of each other. The brighter the cell (darker in the light theme), the larger its share of the bar's volume, so you can see at a glance where the volume concentrated. Change the colors or the overall intensity under "Colors".

Question 4

What are the POC and value area on a footprint chart?

Accepted Answer

The Point of Control (POC) is the price level with the most volume in a bar, outlined in gold. The value area (VAH/VAL) starts at the POC and expands up and down until it holds 70% of the bar's volume; its top edge is the value area high (VAH) and its bottom edge the value area low (VAL), drawn as a thin vertical line between the candle and the cells.
With "POC migration" on, the POCs of consecutive bars are connected, green when the POC moves up and red when it moves down, so you can see which way volume is shifting.

Question 5

What is an imbalance and a stacked imbalance?

Accepted Answer

An imbalance (also called a bid/ask imbalance) is read diagonally: buys at one level against sells one level below, and sells at one level against buys one level above. When one side beats the other by the set ratio (300% by default), the number turns bold and colored, which means one side was clearly more aggressive at that price.
Three or more imbalances in a row on the same side make a stacked imbalance. It gets an outline and extends right as a colored band until a later bar trades through the whole zone. Buy-side stacks often act as support and sell-side stacks as resistance.

Question 6

What is an unfinished auction and a naked POC?

Accepted Answer

If both buyers and sellers traded at a bar's high, the auction up there didn't finish. That's an unfinished auction, and price often comes back to retest it; the same goes for the low. Until price trades beyond them, these levels extend right as gray dotted lines.
A naked POC (also called a virgin POC or nPOC) is a POC that price hasn't touched since. It extends right as a gold dotted line, and traders watch it as a level price tends to get pulled back to.

Question 7

How are large trades marked on the footprint?

Accepted Answer

Large-trade cells are estimated from the trade count: when a cell's average trade size is 3× the bar's average or more, it gets flagged.
Single trades of $5M or more recorded by CoinGlass (the last 30 days, and new ones as they print) are drawn as circles beside the bar they hit, buys on the right and sells on the left, sized by their USD value. Those are actual trades.

Question 8

Bid × Ask, Delta, Volume, Trades, Avg size: what's the difference?

Accepted Answer

Bid × Ask prints sell and buy volume in each cell. Delta shows only buys minus sells. Volume draws a horizontal bar in each cell, which works as the candle's own volume profile. Trades shows how many trades went through. Avg size shows the average trade size: for the same volume, fewer trades and a bigger average look more like large players stepping in.

Question 9

Where does the footprint data come from, and how often does it update?

Accepted Answer

From CoinGlass's record of the exchanges' trades: how much takers bought and sold at each price and how many trades it took, going back about 90 days. Candles and open interest come from the same pair.
On futures the forming bar's footprint is pushed several times a second; on spot it refreshes every 3 seconds. Every 10 seconds the last 3 bars, including open interest (OI), are reconciled again, and once a bar closes it doesn't change.

Question 10

Which exchanges and pairs are supported?

Accepted Answer

Futures: USDT perpetual futures (perps) on Binance, OKX and Bybit, plus USD perps on Hyperliquid. Spot: USDT pairs on Binance, OKX and Bybit, plus USD pairs on Coinbase. There are also two aggregates, Aggregated futures and Aggregated spot, which merge several exchanges into one footprint.
The pair list shows each exchange's most-traded coins, on timeframes from 1m to 4H; type in the search box of the pair button to find any other coin, by coin, exchange, futures or spot.

Question 11

How do you use the chart?

Accepted Answer

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom around the cursor, drag up or down on the price axis to scale vertically, and double-click to reset. Click a bar to list every level in the panel on the right, and drag the divider between the main chart and the panes to resize them. Display mode, markers, colors and other settings are saved in your browser.

Question 12

What is absorption in order flow?

Accepted Answer

Sellers hit the bid hard but couldn't push price lower, because passive limit buyers below took all of it. The rule here: at least 30% of the bar's taker selling sits in the lowest part of the bar, yet the bar closes near its high. That zone gets circled on the chart as bullish. The mirror case at the high is buying absorbed by sellers, which is bearish.

Question 13

What are trapped traders?

Accepted Answer

Traders who chased the move and ended up on the wrong side. Price breaks the 5-bar high with heavy taker buying in the top levels, so people are chasing the breakout; within 3 bars it fails to make a new high and falls back into the lower part of that bar. Those buyers are now trapped and likely to sell to stop out. The chart boxes the trapped prices with hatching, a common read on a fakeout. The mirror case after a breakdown is trapped shorts.

Question 14

What are the two types of Delta divergence?

Accepted Answer

Swing divergence compares two consecutive swing highs: price makes a higher high, but Cumulative Delta (CVD) over that stretch is lower, so the new high wasn't driven by taker buying. That's a bearish divergence, and the chart connects the two highs. At swing lows the mirror case is a bullish divergence.
Single-bar divergence (delta divergence) looks at one bar only: it closes up with negative Delta, meaning more taker selling, or closes down with positive Delta.

Question 15

What is exhaustion in order flow?

Accepted Answer

Price makes a new 10-bar high, but the very top of the bar shows almost no volume and the bar closes in its lower half: the buyers willing to chase have run out. That's buyer exhaustion; the mirror case at a new low is seller exhaustion.

Question 16

Why do signals change with the timeframe or bar type?

Accepted Answer

Signals are computed on the bars you're viewing. Take one sharp flush and recovery: volume bars may split the drop and the bounce into two or three bars and catch the trapped traders, while a 15m candle packs both legs into one bar that just shows a long lower wick. Different signals on different timeframes are normal, and checking a few timeframes side by side gives a more reliable read.
The "Signals" list on the right runs all three bar types (time, volume and range) and shows them together under "All", each tagged with the bar type it came from. Click one to switch to that bar type and jump to it.

Question 17

Can you trade footprint signals on their own?

Accepted Answer

Not recommended. These signals only automate the search for common footprint patterns with fixed thresholds; they don't account for the bigger trend, news or liquidity. Treat them as alerts and confirm with key levels and higher timeframes.

Question 18

What are volume bars and range bars?

Accepted Answer

Volume bars: every bar holds the same volume, for example one bar per 2,000 BTC. Bars print fast when the market is busy and slowly when it's quiet, so each footprint carries about the same amount of information. Range bars: every bar spans the same high-to-low distance, for example $200, so no new bars print while price chops inside the range.
Both are built from 1-minute footprint data and close once the threshold is reached, so a bar can overshoot it slightly. With either one selected, the timeframe dropdown is disabled.

Question 19

How do you read the volume profile and VWAP?

Accepted Answer

The volume profile (VPVR, Volume Profile Visible Range) adds up the volume of every bar on screen by price. Gray is outside the value area, blue is inside, the brightest row is the POC, and VAH/VAL mark the value area edges, extended into the main chart as dashed lines. It recalculates as you pan or zoom.
VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) resets every day at 00:00 UTC; the outer bands are ±1 and ±2 standard deviations.

Question 20

How do you read the Delta, Cumulative Delta and OI change panes?

Accepted Answer

Delta is each bar's taker buys minus taker sells; a positive number means buyers were more aggressive. Cumulative Delta sums Delta bar by bar from the leftmost bar on screen, which makes it CVD (Cumulative Volume Delta), and shows whether price and taker flow move together. In the volume pane, bars at 2× the average or more are highlighted in blue.
OI change is the per-bar change in open interest, futures only. Price up with OI up usually means new longs are opening; price up with OI falling points to shorts closing, and that kind of rally usually has less staying power.

Question 21

What does "≈" mean in the panes and stats table?

Accepted Answer

Max/min Delta is the highest and lowest Delta reached inside a bar. Futures bars that formed while the page was open, with the live push connected the whole time, are measured from the pushes; older bars and spot bars are estimated from the path price took and marked with ≈.
The stats table has one column per bar, with darker shading for larger values. With the volume profile on, the column below it shows totals for what's on screen.

Question 22

How does exchange aggregation work, and can I pick exchanges?

Accepted Answer

Aggregated futures combines Binance, OKX, Bybit and Hyperliquid perps; Aggregated spot combines Binance, Coinbase, OKX and Bybit spot. Within each bar, every exchange's volume is lined up by price and summed. Coinbase and Hyperliquid quote in USD, so they get shifted by the USD/USDT spread first. Candles and price come from the first exchange in the list; open interest is the sum of the exchanges.
With an aggregate selected, the exchange button next to the pair lets you keep only some of them, for example just Binance and OKX.

Question 23

How do you take and share a screenshot?

Accepted Answer

Click "Screenshot" in the toolbar. The current view is captured at 2× resolution with the pair, timeframe, price and time in the header. Draw arrows, boxes, circles or text, then use "Copy image" or "Download PNG". To focus on one signal type, turn the others off in "Markers" first.

BTC Footprint chart

Footprint chartBTC · Binance Perp · 15m

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