Hyperliquid liquidation heatmap

What the map shows

A perpetual futures position is borrowed money. Every leveraged trade carries a price at which the exchange closes it automatically, because the margin behind it has run out. That price is not a secret: it follows mechanically from the entry price and the leverage used.

This map is the liquidation heatmap for the selected venue's HYPE perpetual over the chosen window. It takes the open interest added in each period, works out roughly where those positions were opened, and projects the price at which each standard leverage tier would be liquidated. Stack all of those projections together and you get a surface: bright where a lot of forced closing sits waiting, dark where there is almost none.

HYPE is unusual on this site. It is the token of Hyperliquid, which is itself one of the books on the picker. The deepest HYPE book is the exchange's own, the centralised listings are newer and thinner, and the asset's price and the venue's fortunes are tied to each other in a way that no other page here has to account for.

Time runs left to right, price runs bottom to top: The dotted line is the actual HYPE price over the same window. Bands that survive to the right edge are leverage that price has not yet reached.

How to read it

• Bright bands above price are shorts. If HYPE rallies into one, those shorts get bought back by the exchange, which adds buying to a move that is already up.
• Bright bands below price are longs. If HYPE falls into one, those longs get sold, which adds selling to a move that is already down.
• A band that ends abruptly was consumed. Price traded through it, the positions were closed, and the liquidity is gone. That is why the surface is cleared behind the price line rather than left painted.
• Thin, tight bands very close to spot are the 100x crowd. They are large in count and small in notional, and they get taken out constantly.
• Wide bands far from spot are the 10x crowd. Rarer, much bigger, and the ones that produce the headline cascades.

What is different about HYPE leverage

On every other page of this site, Binance is the default venue because it carries the most leverage. On HYPE it is the wrong place to start. Hyperliquid is the token's native market and its deepest book by a wide margin; Binance, Bybit and OKX listed HYPE perpetuals later and run thinner books on it. The venue picker defaults to Binance for consistency with the rest of the site, but the surface that matters on this page is Hyperliquid's own.

That creates a reflexive loop that no other asset here has. HYPE is the token of the venue where most HYPE leverage sits, the protocol uses trading fees to buy the token back, and traders' confidence in the exchange and their positioning in its token move together. A cascade in HYPE on Hyperliquid is not only a price event; it is read as a statement about the venue, and that reading feeds back into the next wave of positioning.

The centralised books tell a different story from the native one. HYPE leverage on Binance, Bybit and OKX is a smaller, more recently arrived crowd, and its clusters do not line up with Hyperliquid's. A level that is dense on the native book may be empty on Binance, and a move through it will not liquidate anyone there. Comparing the venues on this page is not optional the way it is on Bitcoin; it is the whole exercise.

Hyperliquid publishes its liquidation surface in coins rather than dollars, so it is converted to notional at each level's price before it is drawn, and the 180 day and one year maps are not published for it. HYPE stops at 90 days on every venue.

Why clusters move price

A liquidation is not a normal sale. It is a market order the exchange sends on the trader's behalf, at whatever price the book offers, with no regard for slippage. When a dense cluster is hit, thousands of those orders fire inside a few seconds against a book that has usually already thinned out.

That is the cascade mechanic. Price reaches a cluster, the cluster fires, the firing pushes price further in the same direction, and the push reaches the next cluster. It stops when it runs out of stacked leverage or when resting bids and offers are deep enough to absorb the flow.

Using it without getting run over

1. Start on the Hyperliquid venue, not Binance: The native book is the deepest HYPE market and the one the others follow. A cluster on Binance that is absent on Hyperliquid is a footnote.
2. Treat clusters as risk, not as entries: Knowing where forced selling sits tells you where a move is likely to accelerate. It does not tell you the move is coming.
3. Do not park a stop inside a cluster: That is precisely the price where slippage is worst.
4. Watch which side is heavier: When one side of price holds most of the leverage, the path of least resistance usually runs toward it.
5. Check the window: A cluster built over thirty days is a different animal from one built in the last six hours.
6. Size for the cascade, not the level: If you are long into dense long liquidity below, assume the fall through it will be faster than normal.

What it cannot tell you

• A blended level is not one order book: All exchanges adds the venues together, so a bright band there can be mostly one book. Only that book's own price trading through it triggers those positions, so pick the venue out before sizing around a level.
• It cannot see cross-margin: A trader with collateral spread across several positions is liquidated on portfolio health, not on a single price.
• It assumes standard leverage tiers: Real traders use 7x and 33x and every number in between.
• It is not a forecast: A dense cluster at 8% below spot says what happens if price gets there. It says nothing about whether it will.