Free crypto footprint chart: bid × ask volume at every price
See what actually traded inside each candle: aggressive sells against aggressive buys at every price level, with diagonal imbalances, stacked imbalances and the point of control marked for you. Live from Binance Futures for 31 markets, free in your browser.
- Live Binance Futures data
- 30 coins + XAUUSDT gold
- Runs in your browser
What a footprint chart shows
A normal candle squeezes everything that happened in a period into four prices. A footprint chart, also called a bid/ask footprint or a cluster chart, opens the candle up. Each row is one price level, and each row shows two numbers: the volume sold with market orders at that price and the volume bought with market orders at that price.
That split is the whole point. Every trade has a buyer and a seller, so total volume alone cannot tell you who was in a hurry. The footprint can, because every trade on Binance Futures is tagged with its aggressor: whether a buyer lifted the offer or a seller hit the bid.
How to read bid and ask volume, row by row
Read each row as sells × buys. The left number is volume that traded at the bid: market sell orders hitting resting bids. The right number is volume that traded at the offer: market buy orders lifting resting asks. The bigger side tells you who was more aggressive at that exact price.
Then read the candle from top to bottom. A healthy up-candle usually shows buyers dominating its middle and upper rows, with volume thinning out at the high. A candle that closes up but shows heavy selling in its upper rows is telling you buyers paid up and then ran into sellers.
- Big numbers in the middle of the candle: that is where the real business was done.
- Tiny numbers at the very high or low: aggression ran out there. That is exhaustion.
- Big numbers at an extreme while price fails to move further: someone absorbed the aggression there.
- The delta printed under each candle sums it up: aggressive buys minus aggressive sells.
Diagonal imbalances and stacked imbalances
Buyers lift the offer and sellers hit the bid, so the fair comparison is diagonal: the buys at one price against the sells one row below, and the sells at one price against the buys one row above. When one side is at least three times the other on that diagonal, the tool prints the number in bold. That is a diagonal imbalance: one side crossed the spread with far more urgency than the other.
One imbalance is noise. Three or more in a row on the same side are stacked imbalances: someone kept buying or selling aggressively, level after level, as price moved. The tool counts them for every candle, and stacked imbalances are one of the parts of its fair value gap score.
- Stacked buy imbalances in a breakout candle: the move had real aggression behind it.
- Stacked sell imbalances just after a high: sellers took control there.
- Tiny rows are ignored: an imbalance only counts when that row holds at least 10% of the candle's busiest row, so a 3 vs 1 contract print does not light up.
Absorption: when aggression hits a wall and goes nowhere
Absorption is what happens when one side keeps attacking and price refuses to move. On the footprint it looks like heavy sell volume printing at or near the low of a candle while the candle does not make meaningfully lower lows. Someone with resting limit orders is taking everything the sellers throw at them.
The footprint shows the aggression; the liquidity heatmap behind the candles shows the limit orders doing the absorbing. Because both sit on the same chart and price scale, you can watch a bright bid band hold while red big-trade bubbles print into it. If the band holds and price turns, the absorption was real. If the band vanishes just before price arrives, it was never real support.
Point of control and delta per candle
The gold box in each candle marks its point of control (POC): the single price where that candle traded the most volume. It is the price both sides did the most business at, so traders often use it as a reference when price comes back.
Under each candle the tool prints its delta: aggressive buy volume minus aggressive sell volume. A big up-candle with positive delta is buyers in control. A big up-candle with flat or negative delta deserves suspicion: price rose, but not because aggressive buyers pushed it. The CVD pane under the chart adds those deltas up over time.
The footprint inside fair value gaps
When a candle moves fast enough to leave a fair value gap, its footprint tells you how the move happened. The side panel turns that into a written read for each gap: how many stacked imbalances the candle had and what share of its volume traded inside the gap. Little volume inside the gap means price ran through it with almost no two-way trade, which is a true gap.
When price comes back to the gap, the card adds the delta traded inside the gap on that retest and says who defended it. That is the footprint answering the question traders actually care about: is the side that created this level still there?
A real footprint read on BTCUSDT
From the 1-minute BTCUSDT session in the screenshots on this page. It shows how to read a candle, not a trade signal.
- 1In the 14:37 candle, the left-hand (sell) numbers dominate row after row as price drops: sellers are hitting the bid at every level on the way down.
- 2Several of those rows are bold and consecutive: stacked sell imbalances. The selling was not one big order but aggression repeated price after price.
- 3The gold box marks the point of control at 48.4 × 5.70: at the busiest price in the candle, about 48 BTC was sold aggressively against under 6 bought.
- 4The delta under the candle confirms it: strongly negative. If price later rallies back to that POC, it is the first place to watch for sellers to return, and the footprint of that retest shows whether they do.
What it does and does not do
- Data comes from Binance USD-M Futures only: one venue, not an aggregate of every exchange.
- When you open the chart, the footprint backfills the most recent 40,000 trades and then keeps filling live while the tab stays open. Older candles show no footprint, though their candles, delta and CVD still load.
- Timeframes: 1m, 5m, 15m, 1H and 4H.
- It is a chart, not an order ladder: you cannot place orders from it. Practise the trades on the paper trading simulator in the same account.
- Crypto and XAUUSDT gold only. Stocks have no free public trade tape.
- Free with a Tradeskill account. It runs in a desktop or tablet browser with nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
Is this footprint chart really free?+
Yes. The footprint, liquidity heatmap, CVD and fair value gap tools are free for every supported market. You only need a free Tradeskill account: no credit card and no trial that expires.
How does the chart know which trades were buys and which were sells?+
Every trade in Binance's aggregated trade stream records whether the buyer or the seller was the resting (maker) order. If the seller was resting, the trade was an aggressive buy that lifted the offer; if the buyer was resting, it was an aggressive sell that hit the bid. The footprint adds those up per price level.
What counts as an imbalance?+
A diagonal imbalance is when the buys at one price are at least three times the sells one row below, or the sells at one price are at least three times the buys one row above, and the row is at least 10% the size of the candle's busiest row. Three or more consecutive imbalances on the same side are stacked imbalances.
Why do older candles have no footprint?+
The footprint is built from individual trades. When you open the chart it loads the latest 40,000 trades and records everything after that live. How far back that reaches depends on how busy the market is: a short time on Bitcoin during a fast move, much longer on a quiet altcoin.
Can I change the row size?+
Yes. Row size follows your zoom automatically, or you can fix it to a multiple of the market's tick size in Settings.
What is the difference between a footprint chart and a volume profile?+
A volume profile shows total volume per price over a whole range. A footprint shows volume per price inside each candle and splits it into aggressive buys and sells, so you see when and how each side acted, not only where volume traded.
Is this financial advice?+
No. A footprint shows what traders did, not what price will do next. Use it for education and practise your reads risk-free on the paper trading simulator before trading real money.
Read the footprint live, free
Sign in (or create a free account in seconds) and the chart opens on BTCUSDT. Switch to any of the 31 markets from the coin menu.
Market data from Binance USD-M Futures public streams; Bookmap is a trademark of its owner and is mentioned only for comparison. Order flow is an educational tool, not financial advice — practise with the free paper trading simulator first.