BITCOIN ORDER BOOK PRICE IMPACT
What would a big order do to the price?
How much money is queued close to the price right now, and how far a large order at market would have to walk to get filled.
How much is waiting close to the price?
$101mwithin half a percent$54m queued to buy, $47m queued to sell.$116mwithin one percent$57m queued to buy, $59m queued to sell.$133mwithin two percent$68m queued to buy, $65m queued to sell.This is the money standing between a large order and a worse price. Merged across the 4 exchanges we record, and it is a queue rather than a promise: any of it can be withdrawn before an order arrives.
Has the queue been getting thicker or thinner?
The chart above tracks the same three distances every day since 2026-07-02. When those lines rise, a large order costs less to fill because more is waiting to take the other side of it. When they fall, the same order has to reach further for a price and moves the market more on its way.
What does this mean for you?
For an ordinary purchase, none of it. An order of a few thousand dollars finishes inside the best offer and pays the price on the screen. This page matters at size: it is the difference between the price you see and the price you get when the order is large enough to walk through several offers. It is also a way to tell a calm market from a stretched one, because the queue thins out first and the price moves afterwards.
Understanding Bitcoin Order Book Price Impact
Where it stands today
On Bitcoin's order book, $116.5 M is queued within one percent of the price, which is the money a large order would have to walk through as of .
When you buy at market you do not get one price. You get the cheapest offer, then the next cheapest, and so on until your order is filled. A small order finishes inside the first offer and pays the price on the screen. A large one eats through several and ends up paying an average that is worse. The gap between the two is what this page measures.
How bad that gap gets depends entirely on how much is queued nearby, so that is what the chart shows: the money waiting within half a percent, one percent and two percent of the price, on the buying side and the selling side, every day since we started keeping the record. When the queue thickens, large orders get cheaper to fill. When it thins, the same order moves the price further.
The ladder stops at two percent because the exchanges stop. Each one publishes only the part of its book nearest the price, and in practice that reaches between two and four percent before it runs out. A five or ten percent figure would just be everything we can see wearing a wider label, which would be a worse answer dressed as a better one.
The cost figures are measured on the raw offers at the moment we look, not read off the chart above them. That distinction matters more than it sounds: the chart groups prices into steps about half a percent wide, and the real cost of a million dollar order runs to a few hundredths of a percent. Estimating it from the chart would describe the step rather than the market. So these numbers come from their own record, which began later than the chart, and each one carries the date it started.
Two honest limits. This is the queue as it stands, and anyone may cancel their offer before your order arrives, so treat the figures as the shape of the market rather than a quote. And we do not publish a cost for orders larger than the whole visible book, because the answer would be about where the exchanges stop publishing rather than about Bitcoin.