Crypto footprint chart: public feeds, automatic step, cached history
The crypto footprint chart builds bid × ask bars from public exchange feeds, seeds itself from the local bar cache so the screen is not empty on arrival, and picks its price grouping step automatically from the pair. It is an analysis surface: no order can be placed from it.
Senzoukria · Documentation · Updated September 2026
Where to find it
- Where
- Footprint workspace with a crypto connection profile selected
- Feeds
- Bybit Linear, Binance Spot, Binance USD-M Perp; Databento is available as a separate, licensed source
- Grouping step
- Automatic, with no menu. The tooltip names its origin and reminds you of the quote step, which is a different number.
- Seeding cap
- 5 000 bars are seeded from the cache, keeping the most recent ones
- Order entry
- None — the crypto surface is analysis only
What it does
The chart subscribes to the public trade and book streams of the selected exchange and composes footprint bars from them. Subscription is automatic: the stream starts as soon as the crypto connection is up. Pause is the manual escape hatch, and it stays paused until you pick a different symbol or press Resume.
On arrival the chart does not wait for the live stream to fill it. It reads what the local bar cache already holds for that symbol, timeframe and step, converts those rows into chart bars and merges them under the live ones. The live bar always wins for a bucket it owns, so a seed that lands after the first ticks cannot make the current candle jump backwards to what it was when the query was sent.
Tick-based and count-based grains are deliberately hidden on this surface. Those accumulators live in the futures engine and their history is rebuilt from that broker's tick drain; the crypto connector has neither, so offering them would promise bars that cannot be reconstructed.
Settings and controls
| Setting | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Symbol | From the connection profile | Opens the symbol picker for the selected exchange. |
| Timeframe | Time-based grains only | Tick-based grains are hidden; count grains only appear when the count-bars feature is open for this source. |
| Step | Automatic | The footprint grouping step. Its origin is one of three: taken from the pair catalogue, derived as 0.005 % of the last price rounded to a 1-2-5 ladder, or the quote step until a first price arrives. |
| Export bars | — | Writes the bars currently held by the chart out to a file. |
| Indicators | — | Opens the indicator panel; this surface runs both catalogue indicators and user scripts. |
| Assistant | Closed | Opens the chart assistant drawer. |
| Magnet, Current bar, Time zone | — | The same crosshair, current-bar and time-zone controls as the futures chart. |
| Edit broker | — | Jumps to the account page with the connection manager open. No connection is changed from the chart itself. |
History window
History requests are bounded on two axes. The window is capped at 190 days — six months of candles plus a margin, which is what the kline import can fill. The number of bars is capped separately: for grains of a minute or more the request asks for at most 10 082 bars, and below that the cap is 1 500. The left edge is snapped down to the bar that intersects it, so a 24-hour window is not silently shortened by the elapsed part of that bar.
Deeper history for Binance Spot and USD-M Perp is rebuilt from trade archives. While that runs the chart says so — "Rebuilding real bid × ask history from trade archives — this takes a while." Bars that came back without delta or levels are flagged rather than displayed as if they were complete.
Limits and pitfalls
- Analysis only. There is no order ticket, no position and no autopilot on the crypto surface.
- The step is a grouping step, not the exchange's quote step. Reading one for the other misreads the size of every cell.
- Klines carry no per-trade side, so bars seeded from them can be flagged as carrying no delta and no levels — a strategy reading delta on those bars would see zero.
- Public feeds are the exchanges' own, with their own rate limits and outages. The chart reports a gap; it does not fill one silently.
Related pages
This page in other languages
Frequently asked questions
- Can I trade crypto from this chart?
- No. The crypto surface is for analysis. Order entry exists only on the futures broker surfaces, and any automated execution has to be armed explicitly and is never persisted across restarts.
- Why can I not choose the footprint step?
- It is derived from the pair, because the right step depends on price level and on how far out you are zoomed, and no fixed number fits every pair. Hovering the chip tells you which of the three origins was used.
- Why is the chart empty right after connecting?
- Either the cache holds nothing yet for that symbol, timeframe and step, or the history import has not run. Run the crypto history import, then reopen the chart — it seeds from the cache on arrival.