What Is a Liquidation Heatmap? How to Read and Use It
A liquidation heatmap is a visual map of forced position closures in leveraged futures markets. Coinfuty's heatmap sizes each coin by its liquidation volume, showing at a glance where leverage is being wiped out. Watching which side — longs or shorts — is being liquidated reveals the direction the price pressure is coming from.
Published August 6, 2026 · Coinfuty — figures on this page are generated from Coinfuty’s aggregated live feed and refresh automatically. Latest update: August 6, 2026, 04:32 UTC.
What does a liquidation heatmap show?
A liquidation heatmap turns forced-closure data into a picture, so you can see where leverage is being destroyed without reading tables. Coinfuty’s liquidation heatmapis a treemap of the whole futures market: every tile is a coin, tile size scales with that coin’s liquidation volume over the selected window, and color encodes direction. One glance answers two questions — which coins are liquidating the most, and which side is getting hurt.
Note the term is used two ways in crypto. Some tools map liquidation estimates by price level(where positions would liquidate if price got there). Coinfuty’s heatmap shows realized liquidations — what has actually been force-closed — which makes it a record of market stress rather than a projection.
How do you read it in practice?
Three passes. Size first:a handful of oversized tiles means stress is concentrated — often a single coin’s leverage flushing out — while uniformly small tiles mean a calm market. Direction second: a market dominated by long liquidations is being pushed down; dominated by short liquidations, squeezed up. Context last: compare the total against normal days (the 30-day chart below gives the baseline) — a number that looks large in isolation may be routine. The mechanics of margin, liquidation prices and cascades are in the liquidation guide.
What do liquidations look like over the past month?
As of the latest update, $236.01M in leveraged futures positions were liquidated across all tracked exchanges over the past 24 hours (+50.55% vs the prior day).
The tallest bars are cascade days; their color says which crowd was caught. Click into the live heatmapto see how today’s total distributes across individual coins.
Why do traders watch liquidation data at all?
Because liquidations are involuntary. Ordinary volume mixes every motive — hedging, rebalancing, speculation — but a liquidation prints only when leverage fails, making it the cleanest available measure of pain in the market. Spikes mark where crowded positioning met adverse price; their absence during a large move suggests the move was absorbed without stress. Alongside open interest (how much leverage is standing) and funding (which side pays to keep it), liquidation history completes the leverage picture of the market.
See the live data
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a liquidation in crypto futures?
A forced closure of a leveraged position. When losses eat through a trader's margin, the exchange automatically closes the position at market to stop further loss. Each liquidation is a forced trade, which is why clusters of them move price.
What do long liquidations vs short liquidations tell you?
Long liquidations happen when price falls — leveraged longs are forced to sell, adding downward pressure. Short liquidations happen when price rises — shorts are forced to buy back, adding upward pressure. The split shows which side is being punished by the current move.
What is a liquidation cascade?
A chain reaction: one wave of liquidations pushes price into the trigger zone of the next wave, whose forced trades push it further still. Cascades produce the outsized candles crypto is known for, and they show up as the tallest bars in liquidation history.
Does high liquidation volume mean the market is crashing?
Not necessarily — direction matters. Heavy short liquidations accompany violent rallies, not crashes. And relative size matters too: liquidation volume worth a fraction of a percent of daily trading volume is routine background noise.