BITCOIN ORDER BOOK DEPTH
Where are buyers and sellers waiting?
See the prices where real money is queued to buy and to sell right now, and which of those orders actually stay put.
Every bar is one price step. What is queued to buy runs left, what is queued to sell runs right, and the dashed line is the price right now. Bars marked W are the ones large enough and steady enough to be named a wall. Merged across the 4 exchanges we record.
The exchanges publish only the part of their book nearest the price. Today that reaches about 2.0% either side, so this is the whole queue they show and not the whole queue that exists.
Resting orders across 10 price steps around $79,731. $87.7M is queued to buy and $89.6M is queued to sell.
Inspect Bitcoin order book depth chart
Arrow keys move one displayed price step. Home and End jump to the first and last.
$78,131 to $78,522
- Queued to buy
- Waiting: $1.9M
- Not large enough to be named a wall
The same book through time. Each column is one reading, the vertical axis is price, and brighter means more money resting at that price then. The white line is the price itself, taken from each column's own reading rather than from today's, so the sides stay honest as far back as the map goes.
Brightness is measured against the busiest price in view, so the map rescales when you change the timeframe. Read it for shape and not for a dollar figure.
Where are the biggest orders waiting?
$79,508Biggest buy wall$56.4M queued, 0.3% below the price.$80,305Biggest sell wall$32.8M queued, 0.7% above the price.How much is waiting close to the price?
$122.6MWaiting within 0.5% of the price$56.5M queued to buy, $66.2M queued to sell.$147.5MWaiting within 1% of the price$71.3M queued to buy, $76.2M queued to sell.$175.6MWaiting within 2% of the price$87.8M queued to buy, $87.9M queued to sell.Is the queue bunched up or spread out?
70% sits in the first half a percentOf everything waiting within 2% of the price, that share is already within half a percent of the price. The book is packed tight against the price and thins out quickly as you move away from it.
The exchanges publish about 2.0% either side of the price and no further, so this is the whole queue they show rather than the whole queue that exists.
Which side has more waiting?
Close to evenFor every 50 dollars queued to buy near the price there are 50 queued to sell.
This tips back and forth constantly and it is not a forecast. Orders on either side can be pulled before the price gets near them, which is exactly what the next step measures.
Which of these walls actually stay?
30 minHow long the typical wall lastsHalf of them are gone sooner than this, half last longer.56%Gone within half an hourMost of what looks like a solid wall does not stay one for long.33%Still there after an hourThe longest one we have recorded stood for 28 hours.Of the walls that have gone, the price reached 40% of them before they disappeared. Another 19% vanished while the price was somewhere else entirely, so those orders were taken away rather than met. The remaining 41% we cannot call either way, and we would rather say so than pick the answer that reads better.
Price Side Size What happened Stood for $79,310 to $79,707 buy $56.4M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 45 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $29.4M appeared 15 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy — gone, the price reached it 45 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy $56.3M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 30 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy — gone, the price reached it 30 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $36.8M appeared 15 min $78,915 to $79,310 buy — gone, cannot tell 30 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy $53.7M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 60 min $78,915 to $79,310 buy $17.9M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $28.7M appeared 15 min $80,105 to $80,506 sell $27.6M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, cannot tell 30 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $28.3M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 60 min $80,105 to $80,506 sell — gone, cannot tell 60 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $34.9M appeared 15 min $80,105 to $80,506 sell $31.4M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 45 min $80,105 to $80,506 sell — gone, cannot tell 2.0 h $78,915 to $79,310 buy — gone, cannot tell 45 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy — gone, the price reached it 60 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell $31.1M appeared 15 min $78,915 to $79,310 buy $15.1M moved — $78,522 to $78,915 buy $11.3M appeared 15 min $79,310 to $79,707 buy $51.9M appeared 15 min $79,707 to $80,105 sell — gone, the price reached it 60 min $80,105 to $80,506 sell $25.7M appeared 15 min Measured across 2,682 walls since we started keeping this record. A size with no dash beside it is a wall that has gone, so there is nothing left to measure.
What does this mean for you?
Treat this page as a map of intentions, not of outcomes. The money queued near the price is real money from real accounts, but none of it is committed: any of it can be taken away in the moment before the price arrives, and the record above shows that most of it is.
The walls worth watching are the ones that have already stood for hours rather than the biggest ones on screen, which is why the size shown here is the amount that was genuinely present all along instead of the largest figure it briefly touched. And because the exchanges only publish the queue nearest the price, a quiet map further out means we cannot see there, never that nobody is waiting.
Understanding Bitcoin Order Book Depth
Where it stands today
Bitcoin Order Book Depth is $79.5 K biggest buy wall as of .
An exchange keeps a running list of every offer to buy and every offer to sell that nobody has taken yet. That list is the order book, and its depth is simply how much money is waiting at each price. This page merges the books of the exchanges we record into one picture, so you are looking at the whole queue rather than one venue's slice of it.
Read it as the neighbourhood around the price, not the whole map. Exchanges publish only the part of their book nearest the current price, so what you can see here reaches a couple of percent either side and then stops. That is a limit of what they hand out, not a sign that nothing is waiting further away. It also turns out that almost everything on offer sits far closer than that limit, so the queue is thick right beside the price and thins out quickly as you walk away from it.
A price with an unusually large amount waiting at it gets called a wall. We only name one when that size has been sitting there across the last hour of readings. A big order that flashes into a single snapshot and vanishes is not a floor, and its size on its own cannot tell you which of the two it was, so size ranks the walls but staying power is what lets one be named at all. The figure shown is the amount genuinely present through the window rather than the largest it briefly touched, and when an order did spike we show that peak beside it.
Every other version of this chart is a photograph, and the question a photograph cannot answer is whether any of it will still be there when the price arrives. So we keep a record instead. Every fifteen minutes we check which walls are still standing, and when one goes we look at where the price actually went. If the price reached that level on most of the exchanges we watch, we say the price reached it. If the price was somewhere else entirely, the order was pulled. Often we cannot tell, and the page says so rather than guessing.
Two things worth holding on to. An order can be cancelled at any moment before the price gets there, so a wall is a plan and never a promise. And the prices we use to judge a vanished wall come from a slightly wider set of exchanges than the books themselves, which is fair for Bitcoin because the venues track each other very closely, but it is the kind of detail you should know rather than discover.