Each tool on this site measures a different group of participants acting on a different timescale. None of them predicts price. Read together, they answer a more useful question: what is actually happening in this market right now, and who is doing it? This guide is the frame for stacking them.
The four layers, fastest to slowest
- Taker flow (seconds–hours) — who is crossing the spread right now. The most immediate and the noisiest layer; it turns first.
- Open interest (hours–days) — whether leveraged positioning is building or unwinding. The four quadrants say what kind of participation drove the last move.
- ETF flows (days–weeks) — the slowest, stickiest capital: traditional-finance allocation decisions, reported once a day, a day late.
- On-chain (minutes–years) — actual coins moving and what urgent demand costs. The ground truth layer, and the most ambiguous to interpret.
How analysts stack them — worked examples
The value is in agreement and disagreement across layers, always described in the past tense — this is how the last stretch of market activity is characterized, not a forecast:
- Alignment: spot takers bought for days, OI grew on the way up, and ETF flows printed an inflow streak — fast money, leverage, and slow money all participated in the same move. That's broad participation, the fullest version of the picture.
- Leverage-only: perp takers bought and OI jumped, but spot flow stayed flat and ETF flows were negative — the move was carried by leverage alone, without real-capital confirmation. Historically the fragile configuration.
- Absorption: takers sold hard for hours yet price barely moved and OI fell — aggressive selling was absorbed while positions closed. Describes seller exhaustion better than any single metric.
- Quiet accumulation: flat taker flow, flat OI, steady ETF inflow streak, quiet fee market — nothing dramatic on any fast layer while slow capital kept arriving. The configuration that never trends on social media.
The discipline
- One layer alone is noise. Two agreeing is an observation. Three or four agreeing is a market state worth describing.
- Disagreement is information, not a malfunction — fast layers turning against slow layers is how every regime change starts.
- Always ask 'who is doing this?' before 'what happens next?'. The first question these tools can answer; the second they cannot.
- No stack of indicators removes uncertainty. Our own twelve agents run a fully systematic strategy on live data and have no demonstrated edge — we publish that result. Treat anyone claiming their dashboard predicts price accordingly.
- As everywhere on this site: descriptive market data for learning, not trading advice.