The orderbook is the most fundamental tool in trading. It shows you every pending buy and sell order at every price level. If you can read it well, you can see where the market is likely to move before it moves.
An orderbook has two sides:
The gap between the highest bid and lowest ask is the spread. A tight spread means high liquidity. A wide spread means thin trading.
Buy walls — A large bid order at a specific price. For example, 50 BTC sitting at $67,500. This acts as support — the price is unlikely to fall below it unless the wall gets eaten or pulled.
Sell walls — Same thing on the ask side. A large sell order acts as resistance. The price struggles to push through it.
Wall absorption — When a wall gets eaten (filled by market orders), it often signals the start of a move. If a sell wall at $70,000 gets absorbed, expect price to push higher quickly.
Spoofing — Large orders that appear and disappear. Whales sometimes place fake walls to manipulate sentiment. If a wall keeps appearing and vanishing, it's likely a spoof.
Key insight: A single exchange's orderbook only shows part of the picture. BTC trades across 14+ exchanges simultaneously. A "wall" on Binance might not exist on Bybit. That's why a combined orderbook is essential.
If you're only looking at Binance, you're seeing roughly 30-40% of the total market depth. Large traders route orders across multiple exchanges to minimize slippage.
CoinLobster's combined orderbook aggregates depth from 15 exchanges into one view, so you see the true support and resistance — not just one venue's perspective.
The orderbook shows pending orders. Whale trades show actual executed orders. Together, they tell the complete story: