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Tape speed heat on a BTC chart

BTC on 1-minute bars in the 0xArchive Terminal, 2026-10-18.

Open on a chart

Load it on BTC 1m in the terminal, then change its settings or open it in the script editor.
A heat of prints per price row per bar: where the tape ran fastest. That is often not where the dollars were: at a breakout the fastest rows are many small prints, the crowd chasing, while the largest volume sits a row or two away where positions closed in size. The tone is the view’s own scale, as on the order book heatmap, so a quiet market reads as well as a busy one with nothing to set. A bar’s own trades sit inside its range, behind its candle, so each value is carried into later bars and halves every 10 bars. A level where the tape was fast stays lit while price moves on, then cools. Change Carry in the heat’s settings to fade faster or slower, to Hold (each value stays until price trades back through it) or to Off; nothing reruns.

Inputs

  • Count: Prints, each fill, or Taker orders, an order once at each price it filled at. One order fills against several makers, so prints run about 1.5 to 1.8 times the orders.
  • Against: Nothing, or Last hour, which divides each print by the last hour’s prints a bar. On a long window that lights a quiet session’s bursts as brightly as a busy one’s. It needs an hour of bars before it draws.
  • By side: each row in its faster side’s colour, sellers or buyers, at the row’s total speed.

How it works

plot.heat declares a one-sided heat measured in counts, and heat.add(t.price, 1) in onTrade counts each print at its price. The chart carries the values, groups the rows with the zoom and colours them on the order book heatmap’s ramp. Against the last hour keeps each bar’s count in a tally, averages an hour of them in onClose, and adds 1 / pace per print instead of 1.

Try changing

  • Count only large prints: if (t.notional < 50_000) return; at the top of onTrade.
  • Use measure: 'size' and add t.size to draw traded volume the same way, for comparison.

The script

tape-speed-heat.ts

Next step

See the next example, Stopped-out heat.
Last modified on October 18, 2026