Footprint chart
A candlestick tells you where price went. It does not tell you what it cost to get there. A footprint opens the candle up and shows, for every price level inside it, how much volume traded into the bid and how much traded into the ask.
The Footprint Chart follows the primary instrument. Changing the primary changes the chart.
Reading a cell
Each row inside a bar is one price level. Each level carries two numbers:
- Bid volume — market sell orders that hit resting bids
- Ask volume — market buy orders that lifted resting offers
Their difference is delta for that level. Summed over the bar it is the bar's delta, and that is the number most people are actually after: net aggressive pressure, as opposed to total volume, which counts both sides equally.
Two patterns are worth knowing before anything else:
Heavy volume, no progress. A level absorbing large aggressive size while price refuses to move through it means resting orders are soaking up the flow. That level is defended.
Delta and price disagreeing. A bar with strongly positive delta that closes at its low means buyers were aggressive and got nothing for it. That is a failed push, and it usually matters more than the same delta on a bar that closed at its high.
Display styles
Cluster draws the bid and ask numbers side by side at each level — the classic footprint layout, best when you want to read exact figures.
Profile draws a horizontal volume bar per level, so the shape of the distribution inside the bar reads at a glance. Faster to scan across many bars, less precise per level.
Delta mode collapses each level to its net figure and colours it directionally, which strips out total volume entirely. Useful when you care only about who was the aggressor.
The chart can also render as an ordinary candlestick, hollow candle, line, or volume bubbles, from the chart-type selector — the footprint data is still there when you switch back.
Tick grouping
The tick selector in the toolbar controls how many price levels collapse into one row.
Too fine and every row holds one or two trades — you are reading noise, and the text does not fit. Too coarse and genuine shelves get averaged away. The terminal picks a sensible default from the instrument's price, and you adjust from there.
This is a display setting: the underlying data keeps its full resolution, so widening and narrowing the grouping is free and reversible.
Notional and raw quantity
The $ button in the toolbar switches all volume figures between raw coin quantity and USD notional. It turns the accent colour when notional is active.
The same button exists on the Orderbook and the DOM Ladder, and each panel remembers its own choice.
Notional is generally easier to reason about across instruments — "1.4M went through that level" carries meaning regardless of whether the instrument trades at 90,000 or at 0.6. Raw quantity is better when you are sizing against a specific book.
Bar types beyond time
The interval selector covers the usual time bars — 5s, 30s, 1m, 3m, 5m, 15m, 30m — but it also offers bars that close on something other than the clock:
- Tick — a fixed number of trades per bar
- Volume — a fixed amount of volume per bar
- Range — a fixed price range per bar
- Delta — a fixed amount of net delta per bar
These normalise activity rather than time, so a quiet hour produces fewer bars instead of a run of empty ones. They are built forward from the tape rather than fetched, which is why switching the primary while a non-time chart holds a lot of bars asks for confirmation first — those bars cannot be re-downloaded.
Overlays
The Indicators button opens the overlay set: orderbook heatmap, CVD subplot, volume profile, volume bubbles, period levels, moving averages and more. Each has its own settings, and each is per chart instance — a second footprint chart can carry a completely different overlay set.
Drawing tools live in the left sidebar and behave the way they do in any charting package: trend lines, rectangles, Fibonacci, measurement. A rectangle also doubles as an alert zone; right-click one to arm an absorption alert on it.