Liquidation Cascades
What it shows
A rolled-up view of liquidations across the futures market (Binance Futures, OKX and Bybit): how much capital was force-closed in the last hour, in four hours and in a day, how it splits between longs and shorts, and whether the last hour clearly stands out from a typical hour of the day. Coin, side and exchange filters narrow the windows and the chart: the cascade status stays market-wide. Plus the largest single event, the coins with the biggest liquidation volume and an hourly chart.
How to read it
Start with the cascade status and multiple: that one line tells you whether anything unusual is happening. Then check which side took the hit: a majority of long liquidations means a drop caught the bulls, a majority of shorts means the opposite. The hourly chart shows whether the pile-up was a single strike or has been building for hours. All of it describes the past, it does not say where price goes next.
Parameters
- 1h / 4h / 24h windows
- The total value of liquidated positions in each time window, split into longs (green) and shorts (red), with the event count. The 1h window shows the current pace, 24h gives the whole-day backdrop.
- Cascade
- The status turns on when the last hour's total is several times higher than a typical (median) hour of the past day and exceeds a value threshold. The multiple is stated plainly, e.g. "3.4× a typical hour".
- Negative reading: An active one-sided cascade: historically it accompanies sharp, chaotic price moves and wide spreads.
- Neutral reading: A calm rhythm: liquidations run close to a typical hour's pace, which is the normal background of a leveraged market.
- Typical hour (baseline)
- The median hourly liquidation value from the past day, computed WITHOUT the last hour, so a cascade cannot inflate the very baseline it is measured against.
- Largest liquidation & top coins
- The single largest forced closure of the past day and the coins where the most capital was liquidated. Shows whether the move was concentrated in one contract or spread across the market. The "Other coins" row gathers everything not listed: coins outside our catalog and catalog coins below the ones shown, so the breakdown adds up to the market total without inventing tickers.
- Scope of the total
- Totals cover the three exchanges whose stream we collect (Binance Futures, OKX, Bybit), every perpetual contract on them and every coin. Public aggregates count a dozen or more exchanges, hence their higher figures. On top of that, Binance pushes at most one event per second per symbol on its aggregate channel, so for the busiest symbols our total is a lower bound.
Example
The last hour liquidated $42M against a typical hour of $12M: cascade status on, 3.5×, of which 78% were longs. Largest event: BTC at $4.1M. Historically this setup showed up during sharp drops that caught the bulls off guard. This describes what already happened, not a forecast.