Cross-Market Structure
Bitcoin traders divide their attention between spot, futures, and multiple regional venues, so understanding which market has the most volume reveals who is steering the short-term move. When futures leads spot, speculators might be expressing a different bias than the cash market.
Liquidity and Opportunity
Market makers provide the background liquidity that holds ranges together; when they pull back, spreads widen and breaks feel more violent, so watching order flow alongside funding rates gives you a sense of whether liquidity is sliding away. Align your plans with the levels where whales and market makers both show interest.
The bitcoin market runs on spot trades, where actual coins change hands, and futures, which are contracts that bet on tomorrow’s price. The two interact because futures track the spot price closely, and the difference between them often shows how much conviction speculators hold.
Exchanges in different regions trade at different hours, so a big move in Asia can ripple into Europe and then the Americas as liquidity shifts across time zones. Watching where the volume concentrates helps you understand which venue is currently steering the flow.
Market makers keep orders on both sides to keep trades flowing; they step aside when volatility spikes and step in to patch the spread when things are calm. Their willingness to provide liquidity sets the floor and ceiling around the current price.
Price gets determined when the most aggressive orders hit each other, so tracking where order flow amps up reveals which venue is hot. Seeing a lot of buys filling the wall on one exchange before the rest follow tells you where the move might start.
Tools such as Whalytics bring together spot and futures order flow so you can see where the pressure is building, even if the chart still looks quiet.
This is not investment advice; treat it as a description of the market’s skeleton rather than a trading blueprint.