Every time crypto prices swing sharply, traders on social media start posting screenshots of a colorful chart showing where “liquidations” are clustering — and that chart almost always comes from Coinglass . Unlike price trackers such as CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, Coinglass doesn’t focus on spot prices and market caps. It’s a derivatives data platform that shows what leveraged traders are actually doing behind the scenes — how much borrowed money is in the market, where forced sell-offs are likely to hit, and whether the market is leaning long or short. For anyone trying to understand why crypto moves the way it does during volatile sessions, Coinglass has become close to essential reading.
Key Takeaways
- Coinglass is a free crypto derivatives analytics platform that aggregates liquidation, open interest, funding rate, and order book data from more than 30 major exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, and Deribit
- The platform launched in 2019 under the name Bybt before rebranding to Coinglass as its scope expanded beyond exchange-specific data
- Its most recognizable feature, the Liquidation Heatmap, visualizes price zones where large clusters of leveraged positions are estimated to face forced closure
- Liquidation estimates are modeled from open interest and assumed leverage distributions, not confirmed exchange liquidation engine outputs — they’re directionally useful, not dollar-precise
- Core metrics include Open Interest (total value of outstanding derivatives contracts), Funding Rates (the cost of holding leveraged positions), and Long/Short Ratios (positioning sentiment among traders)
- Most core data is free to access; a Pro subscription unlocks real-time alerts, deeper historical data, and API access
- Coinglass complements price charts rather than replacing them — it explains the leverage and positioning context behind a price move, not the move itself
What Is Coinglass
Coinglass is a cryptocurrency market data and analytics platform focused specifically on the derivatives layer of crypto trading — futures, options, and leveraged perpetual contracts. Launched in 2019 under the name Bybt, the platform later rebranded to Coinglass as its scope expanded beyond exchange-specific metrics toward a more comprehensive view of the global crypto derivatives market. It now aggregates data from more than 30 exchanges into a single dashboard. Where CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko answer “what is the price,” Coinglass answers a different question: how much leverage is currently in the system, and where is it most likely to break.
Core Coinglass Features
Liquidation Heatmap
The Liquidation Heatmap is Coinglass’s signature tool. It plots estimated price levels where clusters of leveraged positions would face forced closure, displayed as color-intensity gradients — brighter zones indicate a higher concentration of positions likely to be liquidated if price reaches that level. Traders use it to identify potential “liquidity magnets,” since large liquidation clusters can accelerate a price move once triggered, in either direction. The heatmap covers multiple timeframes, typically 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day windows, letting traders distinguish short-term leverage buildup from longer structural liquidation walls. It’s worth being precise about what this tool actually shows: these are modeled estimates based on open interest and assumed leverage ratios, not confirmed liquidation engine data pulled directly from exchanges. Data reliability is strongest for high-volume pairs like BTC and ETH, and weakens considerably for lower-volume altcoins where open interest is too thin to produce statistically meaningful clusters.
Open Interest
Open interest measures the total value of outstanding derivatives contracts that haven’t yet been settled or closed. Coinglass tracks this across exchanges and presents it alongside historical OI candlestick charts, an OI-to-market-cap ratio, and exchange-by-exchange dominance breakdowns. Rising open interest during a price move generally signals fresh capital entering positions; falling open interest during a move can suggest the trend is driven more by existing positions unwinding than by new conviction.
Funding Rates
On perpetual futures contracts, funding rates are periodic payments exchanged between long and short position holders to keep the contract price tethered to the underlying spot price. Coinglass aggregates funding rates across exchanges and flags when rates turn extreme in either direction — persistently high positive funding suggests an overcrowded long trade, while deeply negative funding can signal an overcrowded short trade, both of which have historically preceded sharp reversals.
Long/Short Ratio
This metric shows the balance between long and short positioning among traders on a given exchange, broken down by taker volume and, on some exchanges, by top-trader account data specifically. It’s commonly used as a sentiment gauge — an unusually lopsided ratio in one direction is often read as a contrarian signal rather than confirmation of where price is headed next.
Bitcoin Monthly Returns Heatmap and Derivatives Risk Index
Beyond its core derivatives metrics, Coinglass offers two additional tools worth knowing. The Bitcoin Monthly Returns Heatmap charts BTC’s performance broken down by month and year, letting traders spot recurring seasonal patterns and compare current price action against historical cycles at a glance. The CoinGlass Derivatives Risk Index (CDRI) is the platform’s own proprietary risk score, rated 0-100 based on a weighted blend of seven factors including open interest, funding rates, leverage ratios, and liquidation volume — a higher score signals an overheated, more fragile market structure, even if price itself is still rising. Coinglass designed CDRI specifically to warn of structural risk ahead of price, distinguishing it from sentiment-only tools like the Fear and Greed Index.
How to Read the Coinglass Liquidation Heatmap
Reading the heatmap effectively starts with treating it as relative, not absolute — compare the brightness of clusters against each other rather than reading any single zone in isolation. A few practical guardrails matter here. Hedged positions distort the picture: a trader holding both a long perpetual and a short quarterly future on the same asset shows up as open interest on both contracts, even though their net directional exposure is close to zero, and the heatmap can’t distinguish that from a genuinely directional bet. Whale concentration is another blind spot — if a single large entity holds a disproportionate share of open interest at one price level, what looks like a broad “cluster” may really be one position with special liquidation terms. And during extreme volatility or exchange maintenance windows, open interest data can gap or lag, creating clusters that don’t reflect real-time positioning. For these reasons, most experienced users treat the heatmap as one input among several — useful for contextualizing why a price move happened or where it might accelerate, not as a standalone trading signal.
Coinglass vs. Coinalyze
Coinalyze is the closest direct competitor to Coinglass, offering a similar suite of derivatives metrics — open interest, funding rates, and liquidation data — through a comparable dashboard format. The two platforms cover largely overlapping exchange data, and the choice between them often comes down to interface preference and which specific charting tools a trader is used to, rather than a meaningful gap in underlying data quality. Coinglass has the larger user base and brand recognition, in part because its liquidation heatmap has become the default screenshot shared across crypto social media during volatile sessions.
Who Uses Coinglass
Coinglass is used across a wide range of experience levels, from retail traders trying to understand why a sudden price spike or crash occurred, to professional and institutional traders incorporating derivatives positioning into systematic strategies. Its data also regularly gets cited in crypto news coverage — including here at blockchainreporter, where we’ve referenced Coinglass liquidation data in recent Bitcoin News Today , Ethereum News Today , and XRP News Today coverage during volatile market sessions — since it provides a standardized, cross-exchange view that individual exchange dashboards don’t offer on their own. For the full market picture on any given day, see Crypto Market Today or the broader Crypto News Today roundup.
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For more on the platforms and infrastructure behind crypto market data, see our explainers on what DefiLlama tracks and what RWA.xyz measures in tokenized real-world assets .
