Taker buy and sell volume
Updated
Every crypto exchange reports a trading volume, but a single volume number hides something useful: which side was the one crossing the spread to get filled. Taker buy and sell volume splits that number in two. It is a small idea with a common misreading, so it is worth defining carefully.
What is taker buy vs sell volume?
Taker buy volume is the value of trades where the buyer took liquidity by hitting a resting sell order. Taker sell volume is the mirror: the buyer posted and the seller crossed. Every trade has both a buyer and a seller, so this splits the same executed volume by which side was the aggressor. Together they sum to the whole value traded.
Taker versus maker
When two orders match, one was already resting on the book and one arrived and crossed the spread to hit it. The order that was resting is the maker, because it made liquidity. The order that arrived and took it is the taker. A trade is tagged taker-buy when the aggressor was buying, and taker-sell when the aggressor was selling.
This is the point people miss most often. Taker buy volume being higher than taker sell volume does not mean there were more buyers than sellers. Every trade has exactly one buyer and one seller. It means the buy side was more often the one crossing the spread to get filled immediately, rather than waiting on the book. It is a measure of which side was more aggressive, not of how many people were on each side.
How it is measured
BlackForge splits every executed trade in the window by aggressor side and sums the value. It reports ten trade-flow columns in total: taker buy and taker sell volume, the trade count on each side, the average price and average size per side, and the largest single trade on each side. The two volume figures always add up to the total value traded, so the split never double-counts.
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Taker buy volume | 2,451,000.868 |
| Taker sell volume | 2,157,728.754 |
What the split tells you, and what it does not
The taker buy and sell split measures aggressor balance: whether the side lifting offers or the side hitting bids was doing more of the immediate, spread-crossing trading in the window. That is a real property of what happened, and it is finer than a single volume number, because it separates patient resting orders from urgent ones.
What it is not is a prediction. A window where the buy side took more liquidity is a fact about that window, not a call on the next one. Ranking pages that turn a taker buy ratio into a green or red arrow are doing something different from measuring, and BlackForge does not: the columns are the aggressor-split volumes, and the reading is yours. The large-trade counts, split the same way by aggressor side, add a size dimension to the same picture.
Related columns
Taker buy and sell volume sit in the tradeFlow family (buyTradeVol, sellTradeVol) alongside the per-side counts, average prices and sizes, and the largest trade on each side. For the size dimension, the strong family counts taker trades that were multiples of the average size, split by aggressor side. All are measured per pair per closed five-minute window across nine spot venues.
See the full metric reference, or browse the glossary.
Does taker buy volume mean more buyers than sellers?
No. Every trade has exactly one buyer and one seller, so the counts of people on each side are always equal by definition. Taker buy volume higher than taker sell volume means the buy side was more often the aggressor, crossing the spread to hit a resting order rather than waiting on the book. It measures urgency, not headcount.
What is the difference between taker and maker?
The maker is the order that was already resting on the book and provided the liquidity. The taker is the order that arrived, crossed the spread, and removed it. A single trade is one maker matched with one taker. Taker buy and sell volume classify trades by which direction the taker was going, buying or selling.
Is a high taker buy ratio bullish?
It is a measurement of the window that has just closed, not a forecast. It tells you the buy side was the more aggressive one during those five minutes. What that means next depends on the rest of the picture, which is why BlackForge publishes it as a measurement rather than a verdict. Reading it as a trade call is a choice you make, not something the column asserts.
How is taker buy and sell volume measured?
By tagging each executed trade with the aggressor side, then summing the value for buys and sells separately, per pair per closed five-minute window. The two figures add up to the total value traded, so they partition the same volume rather than counting anything twice. The value is in the quote currency of the pair.