Reading the depth chart
The chart under the range control is not price history. It is a map of the competition.
What the bars mean
Each bar is one price step. Its height is the liquidity sitting at that step — capital already committed by other providers, which will absorb its share of the fees from any swap crossing that price.
The two colours split at the current price. Steps below the price hold the quote token; steps above hold the base token. That follows from how the pools work: as the price rises through your range, your position is gradually sold out of one token and into the other.
How to use it
- A tall block around the price means most providers expect the price to stay put. Placing there earns a small slice of a large flow.
- A thin shoulder earns a large slice of whatever crosses it, which may be nothing for days and then a great deal in an hour.
- A gap means nobody is providing at that price. If the market moves there, swaps will be expensive and the few providers present will earn well.
Reading the window honestly
The chart covers a window around the current price rather than every price in existence, and its width adapts to the pool. Without that, a stable pool and a volatile pool drawn on identical axes would make one of them illegible.
Where a pool has more steps than a screen has pixels, neighbouring steps are pooled for drawing only. The step holding the current price is never pooled, so it always shows its exact value. Bar height for a pooled group uses the average rather than the sum, because liquidity is a rate across a price span rather than a quantity at a point — summing would make the height depend on how many steps the group covers instead of how deep the pool actually is there.
The block number the data was read at is shown with the chart. Depth changes as people add and remove liquidity, and a chart without a timestamp is a claim you cannot check.