Coinglass explained: what the liquidation heatmap shows and where its limits lie

Coinglass is a free data site for crypto derivatives. For bitcoin, ether and hundreds of other coins, it brings together three figures you will not see on any price board: how much money is tied up in open futures contracts (open interest), who is currently paying whom (funding rate) and where leveraged positions are being forcibly closed (liquidations). Once you understand how these three values fit together, you will read every headline about a "liquidation wave" differently. Using data as of November 12, 2026, this guide shows what the Coinglass pages display, how to read them and where the limits of its best-known chart, the liquidation heatmap, lie.

The trigger is the market itself: bitcoin fell from just over $74,500 to around $71,500 within 24 hours on Thursday. Moves like this now run largely through perpetual futures, futures contracts with no expiry date. That is exactly where Coinglass comes in. It is useful to you as an investor even if you never trade with leverage yourself: the derivatives data reveal how much borrowed money is in the market and how vulnerable the price is to sudden swings.

What is Coinglass and where does the data come from?

Coinglass collects public market data from large derivatives exchanges and lays it out side by side. That includes centralised venues such as Binance, OKX and Bybit as well as decentralised exchanges such as Hyperliquid, which keep their positions directly on the blockchain. Coinglass does not run any trading itself; the site is an aggregator, a service that combines figures from many sources into one overview.

That has consequences for accuracy. Each exchange reports its values at its own pace and in its own unit: some in contracts, some in coins, some in dollars. Coinglass converts everything into dollars and adds it up. Small discrepancies between Coinglass and the exchange itself are therefore normal. A look at the source shows how large the individual building blocks are. On Thursday evening, Hyperliquid had open bitcoin contracts covering about 39,200 BTC, roughly $2.8 billion at a price around $71,500. In OKX's BTC-USDT perpetual, around 37,200 BTC, or $2.7 billion, was open at the same time. These two contracts alone add up to more than $5 billion.

If you want to compare Coinglass with other tools, our comparison of crypto analytics platforms gives an overview of which services provide on-chain data, derivatives data or both, and what they cost.

Open interest on Coinglass: how much leverage is in the market

Open interest (OI) is the total value of all open futures contracts that have not yet been closed. Each contract has a buyer side (long) and a seller side (short), but it is only counted once. When open interest rises, new money is flowing into bets on the price. When it falls, traders are closing their positions or having them closed.

On the Coinglass open interest page, you can see the total value per coin, the split by exchange and a history over hours, days or months. Reading it follows a simple matrix:

• Price up, OI up: New long positions are driving the rise. The trend has a tailwind but becomes more fragile because more borrowed money is involved.
• Price up, OI down: Short positions are being covered or forcibly closed. A short squeeze like this often does not last, because no fresh money follows.
• Price down, OI up: Traders are opening new shorts. The pressure comes from active bets against the market.
• Price down, OI down: Longs are giving up or being liquidated. This is the typical picture of a sell-off that flushes leverage out of the market.

An example from OKX data: total open interest in bitcoin contracts there stood at $3.61 billion on November 5 and rose to $3.87 billion by November 12, even though the price made no meaningful gains over the same period. More leverage with a sideways price means the next strong swing will hit more positions that can amplify it. You can read how we described this pattern back in September after a short squeeze in the article Open interest climbs after the short squeeze.

Open interest in dollars or in coins?

Coinglass shows open interest in dollars by default. That distorts the picture: if the bitcoin price rises 10 percent, OI in dollars also grows 10 percent without a single new contract being added. Wherever possible, switch the display to coins. Only then can you see whether new positions really were opened.

Funding rate explained: who pays whom in perpetual futures

The funding rate is a fee that flows between the long and short sides of perpetual futures at fixed intervals. This payment keeps the price of the perpetual contract close to the spot price, because a perpetual has no expiry date at which the two prices must converge. If the contract trades above the spot price, the rate is positive and longs pay shorts. If it trades below, the rate is negative and shorts pay.

Coinglass lists the rates per exchange and coin in a table and colour-codes them: green and high means many traders are betting on rising prices and paying for it. Red and negative means shorts dominate. A weighted average rate across all exchanges sums up the situation in a single figure.

How often is it paid and what does it cost?

The interval differs by exchange, and this is where most reading errors happen. OKX settles every eight hours. According to its own funding rate documentation, Hyperliquid settles every hour, applies a base rate of 0.01 percent per eight hours (0.00125 percent per hour) and caps the rate at 0.5 percent per hour. If you compare exchanges on Coinglass, check whether the table has been converted to the same period.

You can estimate the costs yourself. A $10,000 long position at a rate of 0.01 percent per eight hours costs $1 per settlement, $3 a day and, annualised, around $1,095, just under 11 percent of the position size. Hyperliquid itself gives 11.6 percent a year for its base rate, which fits this order of magnitude. A detailed calculation with examples is in our guide Calculating the funding rate on perpetual futures.

What current rates say about sentiment

On November 12, rates were close to the neutral base level. On OKX, the bitcoin contract charged 0.0074 percent per eight hours on Thursday afternoon; in the week before, the rate ranged from slightly negative (on November 7) to 0.01 percent. Hyperliquid was exactly at the base rate for bitcoin, ether and Solana. At the same time, OKX had 3.28 accounts with a long position for every account with a short position, up from 2.43 a week earlier. Many small accounts are therefore betting on a recovery without having to pay a premium for it. That is not a buy signal: a lopsided account split with a falling price only shows on which side the liquidations will occur if things go wrong.

Liquidations in crypto futures: what Coinglass counts

A liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged position by the exchange. It kicks in when the collateral posted, the margin, is no longer enough to cover the loss. For a 10x long entered at $71,500, a drop of just under 10 percent is enough: depending on the exchange's maintenance margin, the liquidation price is then around $64,700. With 20x leverage, a drop of just under 5 percent will do.

On its liquidations page, Coinglass shows how much volume was forcibly closed in the last 1, 4, 12 and 24 hours, split by long and short, by exchange and by coin. These figures appear in the news almost daily, for instance as "$1.54 billion in liquidations", which we reported on October 30 in the article Liquidations in the crypto market and margin calls.

Why the liquidation figures are more of a floor

Not every exchange reports every forced closure in real time. Some centralised venues publish only part of their liquidations or aggregate them. The total on Coinglass is therefore a lower bound rather than an exact value. It works well for the direction (more longs or more shorts hit), less well for the precise amount.

Liquidation cascade: how forced selling turns into a crash

A liquidation cascade is a chain reaction: the exchange sells a liquidated long's position on the market, the price falls further and the next group of positions reaches its liquidation price. In this way, a 3 percent decline can grow to 8 or 10 percent within minutes. These are precisely the zones the liquidation heatmap tries to make visible in advance.

The Coinglass liquidation heatmap: how to read the colours

The liquidation heatmap is the site's best-known chart. Time runs along the horizontal axis and price along the vertical one, and each price zone is coloured according to the estimated volume of liquidations. In its own heatmap guide, Coinglass describes the scale as running from violet for low to bright yellow for high density. You can choose periods from twelve hours to one year.

Yellow bands above the price stand for possible liquidations of short positions, yellow bands below for longs. Coinglass calls such areas "magnetic zones" because, according to the provider, the price tends to head for them: where many stops and forced closures sit, there is liquidity, and large traders look for liquidity. Only the principle is documented, however, not a fixed relationship.

How the heatmap is calculated

The heatmap does not show real orders. It is an estimate. According to Coinglass, it uses trading volume, typical leverage levels and other market data to calculate where positions would probably be liquidated. No outsider can see what leverage an individual trader actually used. The chart therefore assumes that positions are spread across common levels such as 10x, 25x, 50x or 100x and derives the zones from that.

Limits of the liquidation heatmap: an estimate, not an order book

Coinglass itself states that the heatmap values represent relative intensity and that the liquidations actually triggered may be lower than shown. That is the most important sentence about the whole chart. A bright yellow band at $68,000 does not mean a specific sum will come due there. It only means that more liquidations can be expected there than in other zones, if the model's assumptions hold.

Three points limit its explanatory power further:

• Positions change constantly. Traders top up margin, close early or set their own stops. A zone that glows brightly in the morning may have disappeared by the evening.
• The leverage assumptions are blanket ones. If many traders enter with lower leverage than the model assumes, the real liquidation prices are further away.
• Not all exchanges are covered equally well. Decentralised exchanges publish their positions openly, centralised ones only in part.

Coinglass itself recommends combining the heatmap with market depth and open interest. That is the sensible approach: the chart shows you where things could get tight, not where the price is heading.

Long/short ratio and other Coinglass metrics at a glance

Beyond the three main values, Coinglass offers a range of other displays. The most important ones for getting started:

• Long/short ratio: the ratio of accounts or volume with long positions to those with short positions, usually for individual exchanges. A value above 1 means more longs. Account-based values count every small investor as much as a large trader.
• Liquidation map: a bar view of the same estimate as the heatmap, but only for the current moment, summed across price levels.
• Basis and futures premium: the gap between the futures price and the spot price for contracts with an expiry date, a measure of institutional traders' confidence.
• ETF flows: daily inflows and outflows of US spot ETFs on bitcoin and ether.
• Options: open positions and the max pain price, at which most options would expire worthless.

You do not need Coinglass for the price chart itself. You can find the current price and charts for the major coins on our crypto charts page.

Using Coinglass in Germany and the EU: derivatives, regulation and risk

Coinglass itself is freely accessible, with no account and no cost for the basic functions. A paid subscription unlocks finer time frames, alerts and an API for your own analysis. Reading the data is unproblematic in Germany, because Coinglass is an information service and not an exchange.

Trading is a different matter. Perpetual futures with high leverage are offered mainly on platforms outside EU regulation. In the EU, derivatives on crypto assets are not covered by the MiCA crypto regulation but by the rules for financial instruments, and tight leverage limits apply to retail investors for contracts for difference on crypto assets. We have compiled the providers that offer crypto futures within this framework in our guide Crypto futures exchanges in the EU.

Risk is what matters most. With leverage, you can lose your entire stake within minutes, and a liquidation cascade does not care whether your analysis was right.

Coinglass in practice: three values instead of one headline

Regular Coinglass users read the market from the combination of values; a single figure is rarely enough. High positive funding rates, sharply higher open interest and dense yellow bands just below the price point to an overheated long market that is vulnerable to a quick pullback. Negative rates, shrinking open interest and bright zones above the price, by contrast, suggest a market in which a lot of leverage has already been unwound. On November 12, the picture was mixed: neutral rates, slightly higher open interest and a majority of long accounts with a falling price.

Three steps help you use the data sensibly:

1. Choose the right tool: For a quick look, the free Coinglass site is enough. If you want to add on-chain data, compare the services in the analytics platform comparison.
2. Know your venue: Before trading with leverage, check fees, funding intervals and liquidation rules. The decentralised providers are listed in the perp DEX comparison.
3. Set rules before the market turns: Stops and position sizes belong before the entry. If you want to automate this, you will find tools in the crypto trading bot comparison.

(As of November 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)