If you trade crypto derivatives, liquidation data matters.
It shows where leverage breaks.
It explains sudden price moves.
It reveals forced buying and selling.
That’s why people keep asking one question:
Do you have a crypto liquidation data set?
The short answer is yes, but not as a single, unified liquidation feed.
The long answer is below.
What people usually mean by “crypto liquidation data”
When users search for crypto liquidation data, they usually want one of the following:
- A liquidation data set
- Liquidation events by exchange
- Liquidation price, size, and side
- Historical liquidation data
- A unified liquidation feed across exchanges
In most cases, they expect liquidation data to behave like trades data.
That assumption causes confusion.
Why liquidation data is not standardized in crypto
Liquidations are not market-wide events.
They are exchange-specific mechanisms.
Each derivatives exchange reports liquidations differently:
- Some expose liquidation orders
- Some expose liquidation trades
- Some expose partial liquidation fields
- Some publish aggregated liquidation metrics
- Some do not expose liquidation data at all
There is no shared schema.
There is no universal definition.
Because of this, CoinAPI does not publish a synthetic, cross-exchange “liquidation events” feed.
Normalizing liquidation events across venues would hide important differences and introduce misleading assumptions.
-> If you’re not familiar with how perpetual futures work, this breakdown of crypto futures explains why leverage exists, how perpetual contracts stay anchored to spot prices, and why liquidations are enforced differently across exchanges.
What CoinAPI provides instead
CoinAPI provides liquidation data through Market Data Metrics v1.
This is not a single liquidation feed.
It is a structured set of exchange-native liquidation metrics, stored historically and queryable via REST.
Key characteristics:
- Venue-native data
- Explicit liquidation fields
- No inferred flags
- No synthetic normalization
- Historical access
-> This approach follows CoinAPI’s canonical data model. If you’re unsure why some liquidation data is stored rather than streamed, this explanation of real-time vs T+1 canonical data clarifies how metrics are designed for accuracy, auditability, and research.
Supported exchanges for liquidation data
Liquidation metrics are available for selected derivatives venues, including:
- Deribit
- BitMEX
- Binance Futures (USDT-margined)
- Binance Futures (Coin-margined)
- Kraken Futures
- Bitfinex
Coverage depends on what each exchange publishes.
Liquidation metrics available via Metrics v1
Depending on the exchange, CoinAPI exposes liquidation-related metric IDs such as:
- LIQUIDATION_PRICE
- LIQUIDATION_QUANTITY
- LIQUIDATION_SIDE
- LIQUIDATION_TIME
- LIQUIDATION_SYMBOL
- LIQUIDATION_POSITION_ID
- LIQUIDATION_MARK_PRICE
- LIQUIDATION_INDEX_PRICE
- LIQUIDATION_IV
- LIQUIDATION_TICK_DIRECTION
These values come directly from the exchange.
They are stored as metrics, not derived signals.
How to query liquidation data with CoinAPI
Liquidation data is accessed through the Metrics v1 REST API.
You query by:
- exchange_id
- metric_id
- instrument or symbol
- time range
This allows you to retrieve:
- Recent liquidation data
- Historical liquidation data
- Venue-specific liquidation behavior
You can also combine liquidation metrics with:
- Mark price
- Index price
- Open interest
- Funding rates
-> Many liquidation data requests come from backtesting and research. This guide to historical perpetual futures data explains how far derivatives data goes back, what’s available by exchange, and how to retrieve it efficiently.
How liquidation data is typically used
Professional users do not treat liquidations as normal trades.
They treat them as signals.
Common interpretations include:
- Spikes in liquidation quantity indicate forced flow
- Repeated liquidations at the same price show leverage concentration
- Liquidation side distinguishes long vs short pressure
- Differences between liquidation price and mark price reveal execution dynamics
Because the data is historical and explicit, it works well for:
- Research
- Backtesting
- Risk monitoring
- Analytics pipelines
-> Liquidations rarely tell the full story on their own. Open interest data helps explain where leverage is building before forced unwinds occur, and how liquidation events fit into broader derivatives positioning.
When CoinAPI’s liquidation data is the right choice
CoinAPI’s approach is a good fit if you:
- Need historical crypto liquidation data
- Want exchange-native liquidation fields
- Build trading or risk systems
- Care about correctness and auditability
- Prefer transparent data over cosmetic normalization
If you only need a real-time liquidation counter for discretionary trading, this may be more detail than necessary.
What about raw liquidation event streams?
Some exchanges expose venue-specific liquidation streams.
These streams are not standardized and often do not fit a unified API.
If you need:
- Raw liquidation streams from a specific exchange
- Additional derivatives venues
- A scoped or pass-through integration
This can be discussed separately.
Final answer
If you want to see exactly which liquidation metrics are available by exchange, start with the Metrics v1 documentation and the metric ID catalog, where each liquidation field is listed explicitly.
From there, you can query liquidation data directly via the Metrics v1 REST endpoints and combine it with open interest, mark price, and funding rate metrics to build your own analysis or models.
