What the Liquidation Map Shows and What It Doesn't — A User's Manual Written by the People Who Built the Beta

After we put the liquidation map under Settings › Tools (beta), our first worry was not that the screen was hard to read. It was that it was too easy to read. Bars stacked at each price level make a persuasive picture, and persuasive pictures invite you to read things that are not there. So this column is the user's manual, written by the people who built it. We will spend more words on what is missing than on what is present.

At a glance

• Satoshi Note's liquidation map (Settings › Tools, beta) stacks the actual liquidation prices of positions held by the top 100 or 200 accounts on Hyperliquid, Lighter and Pacifica, by price band. Bars above the current price are shorts, bars below are longs.
• It covers public top accounts, not the whole market; it is a snapshot with no time axis; range pills ±5, 10, 25, 50%. dYdX publishes no liquidation prices and is left out. Positions refresh every 30 minutes, the price every minute.
• Nothing guarantees that price will travel to the thickest bar. This is a user's manual that draws the boundary, not a forecast or a recommendation.

What it shows

The liquidation map takes the currently open positions of the top accounts in the Satoshi Index (1-week or 1-month ranking, top 100 or 200) and stacks the actual liquidation price the exchange has recorded on each position, by price level. Bars above the current price are where shorts get liquidated; bars below are where longs do. Range pills (±5, 10, 25, 50%) choose how wide a band around the current price you look at, and a candle chart beside the bars, drawn on the same price scale, shows where those levels sat recently.

The important phrase is "actual liquidation price." It is not an estimate reverse-engineered from leverage. It is the value written on each position in the exchange's public data. So every bar is a position that really exists. That is the full extent of what this screen can claim.

What it doesn't show, 1: the whole market

The map is not the market's liquidation distribution. It is the positions of the top 100 to 200 accounts in the Satoshi Index. Those accounts move serious money, but they are a sliver of everyone trading that coin.

Liquidation heatmaps on other services are usually estimated from total open interest and an assumed leverage distribution. Theirs is wide but estimated; ours is narrow but real. They are different pictures, and neither is the "correct" one. If our screen shows "$20M of long liquidations within ±10%," that does not mean the market has $20M of long liquidations waiting there. It means that much among the top accounts.

What it doesn't show, 2: the positions that are left out

Three kinds of positions never make it into the bars.

• dYdX positions. Among the exchanges we aggregate, dYdX publishes no liquidation price in its public data, so the map's sources are Hyperliquid, Lighter and Pacifica. That means its sources differ from the ranking and per-coin aggregates.
• Some cross-margin positions. When one account's whole collateral backs several positions, a single position may have no defined liquidation price. We exclude those and print the count at the bottom of the screen: "n positions with unknown liquidation price were left out."
• Accounts that hide positions. Some exchanges let an account turn off position visibility. Such an account can be in the ranking and still contribute nothing to the bars.

These omissions are not random. Larger accounts tend to use cross margin, so what you cannot see may well be bigger than what you can.

What it doesn't show, 3: time

The map is a snapshot of positions open right now. Positions are refetched every 30 minutes and the current price every minute, but nothing records where yesterday's bars were, which bars vanished (liquidated or closed) and which appeared. The "liquidation levels chasing price around" that a time-by-price heatmap shows elsewhere does not exist on this screen.

So "that bar got thicker" is something you can only say if you looked twice and remembered. The screen does not say it. Stacking snapshots to show a trend is possible; we have not built it, and have not decided whether to.

What it doesn't show, 4: any guarantee that price goes there

This is the part we most want on the record. When you see a thick stack of bars at one price level, you want to read "price will come and hit that." Levels where liquidations cluster are levels where forced orders cluster, so moves do tend to be larger if price gets there. But there is no guarantee it gets there, and this screen was not built to provide one.

Add up the three gaps above and the reason is plain. A picture of part of the market, part of its positions, at one moment, cannot tell you where price goes next. A bar says "these accounts get liquidated here, right now," and nothing more.

Use it as a mirror

So what is it for? We suggest using it the way we described the Satoshi Index: as a mirror, not an answer key. If your own liquidation price sits at the same level as the top accounts' bars, you will not be alone when price reaches it. If the top accounts keep their liquidation prices far further away than yours, your leverage is higher than theirs. Both answer "where am I standing," not "where is price going."

That is also why it is labeled beta. It is a good-looking screen with a lot of edges, so we opened it first to people who can read the edges along with the picture.

FAQ

What does a bar on the liquidation map mean?

The total notional of top-account positions that would be liquidated in that price band. Bars above the current price are short positions' liquidation prices; bars below are longs'. They are the exchanges' published liquidation prices, not estimates.

How is it different from the Coinglass liquidation heatmap?

Coinglass models the whole market as a time-by-price heatmap. Satoshi Note's map stacks the real liquidation prices of 100–200 public top accounts with no time axis. Narrower coverage, but the numbers are actual.

Does price get pulled toward the thickest bar?

There is no such guarantee. The screen cannot prove that liquidations attract price, and when we counted last week's real liquidations, ETH was the only coin whose bars were actually reached.

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This is a column: the Satoshi Note team's view, not a price forecast or a recommendation to take any position. The liquidation map lives under Settings › Tools (beta), and its sources, range and the count of excluded positions are printed on that screen.