Analytics · Order flow
Buy/Sell Volume, explained
Who is being aggressive in the market right now. Taker buy and sell volume measures the money arriving as market orders on each side, across the major futures venues, read against price. What a taker is, how the two sides are counted, and what this fast, noisy chart can and cannot tell you.
- Measures
- Taker flow
- Venues
- 8
- Intervals
- 1H · 4H · 1D · 1W
- Source
- CoinGlass
market orders, not resting limit orders
major futures exchanges, added together
shorter trades history for detail
with a price line for context
What is Buy/Sell Volume?
It measures aggressive order flow: how much money arrives in the market as market orders, which trade straight away at the best available price, instead of waiting in the order book as limit orders. The chart splits that flow into a taker buy side and a taker sell side and plots it against price.
This is buy and sell flow, not total trading volume. It tells you which side has been pushing harder in a window, not how much traded overall.
Takers and makers
Every trade pairs two orders. A maker is a resting limit order waiting in the book. A taker is an incoming market order that trades against it immediately. A taker buy lifts the offer, and a taker sell hits the bid.
The chart counts the taker side of every trade. The idea is that the order that arrives, rather than the one that waited, shows who was in a hurry.
Where the numbers come from
The flow comes from CoinGlass, which adds the taker buy and sell volume of eight major futures exchanges: Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, MEXC, Hyperliquid and BingX. The price line comes from CoinGecko, which is how each bar is lined up with where price was at that moment.
You can switch between futures and spot, and between one-hour, four-hour, daily and weekly bars. Shorter bars give more detail over a shorter history, and longer bars reach further back.
Net, or buy and sell side by side
The default Net view shows taker buy minus taker sell as one set of bars: positive when more money arrived as market buys, negative when more arrived as market sells. The Buy/Sell view plots each side separately so you can see how large each one is, not only the gap between them.
The four boxes above the chart show the latest buy, sell, split and net, and a table breaks down the last 24 hours by exchange for futures.
How to read it
Read the balance over a window, not a single bar. One large bar is one moment. A run of bars leaning the same way shows a sustained lean.
Read it against price. A rising price with net taker buying describes money actively arriving. A rising price with net taker selling describes a move that fewer aggressive buyers are pushing. Both are descriptions of the period they cover, not forecasts.
What the chart does not tell you
Flow data feels precise, which is when it is easiest to over-read. Four things to keep in view.
It is flow, not total volume
The chart counts only the aggressive side of each trade: the market order that arrived. Every trade also has a resting limit order on the other side, which is not shown. It is a read on who is pushing, not on how much traded.
It is fast and noisy
Taker flow swings hour to hour and day to day. It describes short-term pressure over hours to days, not longer-term positioning, and a single large bar does not make a trend.
It covers a fixed set of venues
The figures add together eight major futures exchanges and leave out everything else. A move concentrated on another venue, or off exchange, is not in the numbers.
A buyer is not a bullish view
Taker buying can be a trader opening a long, closing a short, or hedging something else. The chart sees only the side of the order, never the reason for it, so net buying is a description of the order flow and nothing more.
The chart shows which side arrived more aggressively. It cannot show why.
Where it fits
This is a short-term, background chart in the Analytics section, alongside the open interest, funding and long/short charts. It is fast, it is noisy, and it is not an input to either Heatmeter. It is most useful as context next to the slower charts, to see what the aggressive side of the market has been doing over recent hours and days.
Common questions
What is the Buy/Sell Volume chart?
A chart of aggressive order flow: how much money arrives in the market as market orders (the taker side), split into taker buy and taker sell, added together across eight major futures exchanges and plotted with the price. The default Net view shows buy minus sell as one set of bars. The Buy/Sell view plots each side separately so you can see absolute size. It is a chart to read, not a score, and it does not feed either Heatmeter.
What is a taker, and what is a maker?
Every trade pairs two orders. A maker is a resting limit order sitting in the order book. A taker is an incoming market order that trades against it straight away. A taker buy lifts the offer, and a taker sell hits the bid. This chart counts the taker side only.
Is this the same as trading volume?
No. Total volume counts every trade once. This chart splits the aggressive side of trades into buying and selling, so it shows the balance between the two, not how much changed hands overall.
What does Net mean?
Taker buy volume minus taker sell volume for each bar. A positive bar means more money arrived as market buys than as market sells in that period, and a negative bar means the opposite. It describes the order flow in that window and says nothing about what comes next.
What is the difference between futures and spot?
Futures covers eight major derivatives venues and includes a per-exchange table for the last 24 hours. Spot covers taker volume on spot markets and has no per-exchange table. A toggle switches between them. The two can tell different stories because the people trading them differ.
Is this a buy or sell signal?
No. It describes which side has been arriving more aggressively in a given window. Patterns between the flow and price have shown up before, but they are historical observations and not a guide to what happens next.
Related guides
Others in market structure — How much borrowed money is in the market, which way bets are leaning, and where money is moving.
- LiquidationsWhere leveraged positions were forcibly closed, long against short.
- Hyperliquid Whale PositionsThe largest open positions on an on-chain perpetuals exchange: who is long, who is short, and how close each sits to liquidation.
- Options Max PainThe price at which the most options would expire worthless, for every upcoming expiry, next to the money riding on each.
- Liquidity FlowWhich part of the crypto market is winning share and which is losing it, on a monthly and a daily view.
- Liquidation HeatmapEstimated price levels where leveraged futures would be force-closed, from CoinGlass price and open interest.
Every indicator we track — the full glossary.
Open the chart
Everything above is the method. On the chart you can switch between futures and spot, pick the bar size, flip between the Net and Buy/Sell views, and see the per-exchange breakdown for the last 24 hours.