Depth of market, free.
Footprint charts are free on Basis, on live crypto markets, with no account and no trial. Every candle is opened up so you can see how much traded at each price and which side was the aggressor.
What you get
- Bid and ask volume printed at every price level inside each bar
- Delta per level and per bar, so absorption and initiative are visible rather than inferred
- Imbalance highlighting where one side outweighs the other by a ratio you set
- Real aggressor data from the trade tape, not a guess derived from where the bar closed
- Tick grouping you control, so a level can be one tick or a sensible cluster of them
Why this is usually paid for
Footprint is the feature that most reliably separates a free charting tool from a paid one. It needs the raw trade tape rather than candles, which is heavier to fetch and heavier to draw, and it is the thing serious order-flow traders will pay for. That combination makes it the obvious place to put a paywall.
Basis fetches the tape for the window you are looking at and renders in your browser. There is no per-seat data licence behind it and nothing to meter, so there is nothing to charge for.
How to use it
- 1
Open a footprint chart
The button below opens the terminal with the footprint already selected. Zoom in until the bars are wide enough to show their numbers — a footprint needs horizontal room to be readable, and the chart will not shrink the text to fit.
- 2
Read the two columns, not the bar
Each row is a price. The left figure is volume that hit the bid, the right is volume that lifted the ask. A row where one side dwarfs the other is where someone was working, and the colour highlights it for you.
- 3
Look for absorption at the extremes
Heavy selling into a low that does not break the low is absorption: someone took everything offered and price still held. That is a different event from a low made on thin volume, and only a footprint distinguishes them.
Questions
Is the bid and ask split real or estimated?+
It is real where the exchange publishes the trade tape, which is the case for the venues on Basis. Each trade carries a flag saying whether the buyer or the seller was the aggressor, and the footprint counts them directly rather than inferring the split from the close position within the bar.
Why do the numbers disappear when I zoom out?+
A footprint needs enough pixels per bar to print two columns of figures legibly. When the bars are narrow the chart hides the text rather than rendering something unreadable, so zoom in until the numbers return. This is a display limit, not a data limit.
How far back does the footprint go?+
As far as the trade tape the venue serves for that window. Panning to an older period loads the tape for that period, so history is available, but it arrives when you ask for it rather than being held for the whole chart at once.
Do I need to create an account to use it?+
No. The footprint works immediately on a live chart with no sign-up, no email and no trial period. An account exists only so that your layouts and saved work follow you between devices, and it changes nothing about which features you can reach.
Open it and see
The chart opens with this already turned on. Nothing to configure, nothing to sign up for.
Open the chartAlso free
Updated 2026-08-23 · Indicator reference · Documentation · Terminal