A volume spike in one line
A volume spike is a single minute in which a market trades several times its normal amount. Most minutes on a liquid market look much like the ones before them. A spike is the exception: a burst of orders, often from news, a large fund working a position, a listing, a liquidation cascade or a coordinated pump. Volume tells you that something is happening before the price chart has finished telling you what.
A spike on its own says nothing about direction. A large seller dumping into bids produces as much volume as a large buyer lifting offers. That is why each spike on this site also carries a side and, later, a record of what price did next.
How the scanner detects one
The live spike scanner reads 1-minute candles from the public market-data feeds of each exchange it covers, for spot markets, perpetual futures and Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets. For every market it keeps a rolling window of the last 60 closed minutes and takes the median quote volume as that market's normal minute. The median, not the average, is used on purpose: one earlier burst would drag an average up and hide the next spike, while the median barely moves.
A minute becomes a spike when its volume is at least 4× that baseline. A few filters keep the feed readable:
- Minimum size. The minute has to trade at least $30,000 on spot or $75,000 on perps, so a thin market going from $2,000 to $10,000 does not count.
- Liquidity floor. Markets with too little 24-hour volume are skipped altogether, as are stablecoin pairs, whose volume moves for reasons that say nothing about price.
- Warm-up. A market needs 15 minutes of history before its baseline is trusted.
- Cooldown. After a spike, the same market stays quiet for five minutes unless the ratio doubles.
Levels and sides
Every spike gets a level from its ratio to the baseline: level 1 from 4×, level 2 from 8× and level 3 from 16×. A spike is also raised one level when the same coin spikes in the same direction on another exchange or market within three minutes. A move that shows up on several venues at once is harder to dismiss as one trader's order.
The side comes from taker flow, the trades that crossed the spread. If 60% or more of the minute's volume was taker buying, it is a buy-side spike. At 40% or less it is sell-side, and anything in between is mixed. When an exchange does not report the taker split, the candle's own move decides instead. The per-exchange pump scanners show the buy-side spikes for one venue at a time.
How to read hit rates
For each spike the site stores the close of the spike minute, then the price 5, 15 and 60 minutes later. The follow-through is that change in the spike's direction: the change itself after a buy-side spike, and the change with its sign flipped after a sell-side one. A spike is a hit at a horizon when its follow-through is above zero. The spike outcome tables count the hits and split them by exchange, level, side and market type.
A few rules make these numbers easier to read:
- 50% is the baseline. With no information at all, price is about as likely to go one way as the other over an hour. A hit rate of 52% on a few hundred spikes is within noise.
- Look at the median as well as the rate. A 60% hit rate with a median follow-through of +0.05% means small, frequent wins. A lower hit rate with a larger median can come from a few big moves.
- Check the sample size. Cells with few spikes swing a lot from week to week, and the tables grey them out.
- Costs are not included. Outcomes are measured from the spike minute's close, which you could not have traded at, before fees, slippage and funding.
Mixed spikes have no direction, so they count toward totals but not toward hit rates. The live box on this page shows how many spikes fired in the last 24 hours, the 1-hour hit rate from the outcome tables and the most recent level-3 spike, all from the same stored history. The daily spike archive lists each day's largest spikes with their outcomes.
Where spikes mislead
- Wash and incentive volume. Trading competitions and fee rebates can create volume that nobody needed to trade.
- Scheduled events. Funding settlements, index rebalances and options expiries bring predictable bursts that are not news.
- The end of the move. The largest volume often arrives as a move exhausts itself, when late buyers and forced sellers meet. A spike can mark a top as easily as a start.
Treat a spike as a prompt to look at the chart, the order book and liquidations, not as an instruction. The statistics here describe what happened after past spikes. They are not a forecast.
Checked against the exchanges' own documentation on 28 September 2026: Binance API: kline/candlestick data · Bybit API: kline stream · Hyperliquid API: websocket subscriptions. Not financial advice.