How to Read a Liquidation Heatmap | Real CoinGlass Screens

On days when Bitcoin swings hard, a chart with yellow bands running across a purple background makes the rounds on social media. That is a liquidation heatmap, and you can view it on CoinGlass for free.

Open it, though, and there are a lot of settings, and what the bands mean is not obvious at a glance.

This article walks through the real screens: how to open the chart, how to read the bands, the settings that change what you see, and how to use it in trading.

We will also cover the fact that the chart is an estimate derived from open interest rather than a record of actual liquidations, along with the limits CoinGlass itself spells out on the screen. Knowing how to read it and where it breaks down together is what makes the chart usable.

A liquidation heatmap takes open interest in perpetual futures (perps) - the total volume of positions still open - and color-codes how much forced liquidation is likely stacked up at each price level.

The vertical axis is price and the horizontal axis is time, and the closer a color moves from dark purple toward bright yellow, the more liquidations are estimated to be concentrated at that price level.

Where a band sits carries meaning. A band below the current price is a cluster of longs that get force-closed if price falls; a band above it is a cluster of shorts that get force-closed if price rises.

This is not a record of liquidations that actually happened, though. Exchanges do not publish how much leverage individual traders are using, so the chart applies several leverage multiples to open interest and back-calculates the liquidation prices - an estimate.

How It Differs From the Liquidation Map

CoinGlass has a similarly named chart called the Liquidation Map. The map is a snapshot showing liquidation intensity at each price level as bar length, and it has no time axis the way the heatmap does.

Tick the "Liquidation Map" checkbox at the top right of the heatmap screen and you can display the two side by side, as in the screen below.

Image: Screenshot of CoinGlass (captured August 13, 2026)

Because the heatmap's horizontal axis is time, you can follow how bands build up and fade out. The map is a tool for the distribution at this instant; the heatmap is a tool for how that distribution moves.

CoinGlass is the de facto standard. Getting to the chart takes three steps, and no sign-up is required.

1. Open coinglass.com
2. Select "Liquidation" in the top menu
3. Select "Liquidation Heatmap" from the "Liquidations" group in the left menu

Image: Screenshot of CoinGlass (captured August 13, 2026)

What you get for free comes in steps. The default 24-hour view is visible without registering, but as you switch timeframes a "Log in to unlock full data" prompt can appear.

The API that pulls the same data programmatically is limited to the higher paid plans (Professional and Enterprise). The header also links to the official app (Download APP), so basic viewing on a phone is free as well.

Image: Screenshot of CoinGlass (captured August 13, 2026)

The screen above is the Binance BTC/USDT 24-hour view from August 13, 2026. Let us read this actual chart in order.

The right edge of the candles - the current price - is around $63,900. Just above it, around $64,000, runs the brightest yellow band on the screen.

Because it sits above the current price, that is the level where short liquidations are estimated to be stacked. Looking down, there is another bright band a little below $63,000, and that one is a cluster of longs that would be liquidated if price falls.

So at that moment the chart is showing this: move about $100 up and price enters the short liquidation cluster; move about $1,000 down and it enters the long cluster. It is a chart for reading which direction is more likely to set off a batch of forced-liquidation orders.

The vertical scale on the left edge (0 to 54.59M on this screen) measures liquidation intensity, but it is a relative value, not a measured dollar amount. What this chart supports is that one band is brighter than the band next to it, not that a band holds $50 million.

Even for the same asset at the same moment, the position and intensity of the bands change with the settings. There are four you can move on the screen.

The Pair and Symbol distinction feeds straight into how you read the chart. Pair is one exchange's open interest structure, Symbol is an aggregate closer to the whole market, and which one you are on changes whose liquidation bands you are looking at.

Shorten the timeframe and you see structure built up recently; lengthen it and you see levels accumulated over a wider period. Switching between them and looking for the bands that survive in both is the practical approach.

Image: Screenshot of CoinGlass (captured August 13, 2026)

The Model and the threshold are evidence that there is no single answer. With the same open interest data, change the assumed leverage distribution (Model) or the painting cutoff (Threshold) and the places that look bright change with it.

The practical use of this chart is less about calling direction and more about managing volatility and where you place orders. The common readings sort into three.

The reason a band becomes a target is simple: when price enters a cluster, forced-liquidation market orders can chain together and send price running in a short window. Put a stop just in front of a band and you are more likely to get caught in that move.

The funding rate shows which side, longs or shorts, is paying the other. If the band above is bright and funding is negative (shorts crowded), for instance, the ground is set for a short squeeze - that is how you read the chart in combination with other indicators.

Watch out for hindsight bias. You can find any number of cases where price reversed after reaching a band, but nobody shares the chart from the times it missed, so in hindsight the hit rate looks higher than it is.

→ Read how Hyperliquid works, a perp DEX whose liquidation terms are officially documented

CoinGlass states the nature of this chart plainly, right on the heatmap screen. It predicts where liquidation levels are likely to start, but not where they stop. The actual number of liquidations will therefore be lower. Read the magnitude as a relative value compared with other levels.

You can check the actual scale at the top of the screen as well. As of August 13, 2026, open interest across all exchanges stood at roughly $116.4 billion, while about $174.09 million was actually liquidated over the prior 24 hours. That works out to around 0.15%.

A day when an entire mountain of liquidations in the chart collapses at once basically does not arrive in normal conditions. Reading a band's brightness as a dollar figure was never what the chart was built for.

The root of the limit is in the structure of the estimate. Among the inputs, open interest and price are public data, but the distribution of who is trading at what leverage is not, and that gap can only be filled with assumptions. There are three Models - three answers - because there is no single way to set that assumption.

If You Only Use Exchanges in Japan

Crypto margin trading available to individuals in Japan is capped at 2x leverage under the Financial Services Agency's policy (in force since May 2020). The distance to liquidation is an order of magnitude different from overseas traders who can go up to 40x, so most of the bands on the chart are not your positions.

As a tool for managing your own liquidation risk it is remote, but it still works as material for reading which way the overall market is leaning and where things tend to get rough.

The liquidation heatmap is three clicks to open, and the core of reading it fits in one line: above the current price is the short liquidation cluster, below it the long cluster.

On top of that, the chart is an estimate from open interest, a relative-value chart whose own operator writes that actual liquidations will be fewer. So its use is not calling direction but the order and risk management side: placing stops outside the bands, and reading an approach to a band as a warning that things may turn rough.

Start by opening today's screen and checking with your own eyes whether the bright band sits above or below the current price.

→ Read how Lighter works, a perp DEX running order-book trading on a zk rollup

Sources

1. CoinGlass Liquidation Heatmap (2026)
2. CoinGlass Liquidation Map (2026)
3. CoinGlass "How to use Liquidation Heatmaps to assist trading?" (2026)
4. CoinGlass API Documentation - Liquidation Heatmap (2026)
5. bitbank plus, "How to Read the Bitcoin Liquidation Heatmap" (2026, in Japanese)
6. Financial Services Agency of Japan, "On the Development of the Regulatory Framework for Crypto Assets" (2021, in Japanese)