Why prices
move
“Sentiment improved.” “Macro headwinds.” Those aren't explanations — they're the price restated in different words. This site splits the “why” into four layers and, for each one, tells you how it works, when it stops working, and how you can see it working. No direction calls, no targets.
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The four layers
- L1 Supply and demandIssuance, unlocks, long-term holders, exchange balances. Works on a scale of months and years — it cannot explain an intraday crash.
- L2 Macro conditionsRates, the dollar, overall risk appetite. One move tells you most of what you need: check whether markets outside crypto moved the same way.
- L3 Leverage and sentimentOpen interest, funding rates, liquidation cascades. An amplifier, never the engine — when days of range happen in minutes, this is usually why.
- L4 Structural eventsHalvings, ETF plumbing, regulation, platform failures. Note: an event everyone saw coming carries almost no new information on the day it lands.
Start with these two
One gives you the framework, one teaches you to spot fake explanations. Everything else reads faster afterwards.
L1–L4 Overview In depth
The four layers that move crypto prices
Supply structure, macro conditions, leverage and sentiment, structural events. Each layer comes with a test for whether it can explain the move in front of you, and where to find the public data.
M Method In depth
Why “sentiment improved” explains nothing
Six sentence patterns from financial filler, why they are circular, and a four-step routine you can run yourself: whole market first, then flows and events, then leverage — sentiment comes last.
The four most-searched “why” questions
All written as method, not as a daily recap — the logic is the same whether you open them today or a year from now.
Why is crypto crashing today
What to check and in what order: is the whole market moving together, is there a matching flow or event, what is the leverage doing — and only then, sentiment.
Why bitcoin falls
Which layers are usually at work on the way down, and how a liquidation cascade turns a small drop into a large one.
Why bitcoin rises
What you can and cannot see on the way up, and which “bullish news” was already in the price before it was published.
Why the price already moved before you saw the news
Information latency and expectation pricing. This is the article that treats the most common losing habit: acting on a headline.
Eight tools
Everything runs in your browser — nothing uploaded, no signup. The first three read live public market data to answer “what is the state right now”; the other five are evergreen reference pages. None of them predict direction or give signals.
Market heatmapLIVE
Every major pair's 24h move on one screen, plus a computed alignment score that answers step one: is this systemic, or is one coin doing its own thing?
Funding rates and leverageLIVE
Funding rates on major perpetuals, annualised, alongside open interest. It measures how crowded positioning is — not whether that positioning is right.
Order book depth and impactLIVE
Enter an amount and see, against the live book, how many levels it eats, what slippage it pays, and what it would cost to push the price 1%.
Layer explorer
Open any of the four layers: how it works, when it fails, which public indicators to watch, and where to find them.
News impact classifier
Pick a type of news and see which layer it usually works through — and, more usefully, what it commonly does not mean.
Volatility timeline
Documented large moves: what was verifiable at the time, and where the attributions still disagree.
Halving facts table
Block heights, reward changes and the conditions around each halving. Facts only, no extrapolation.
Glossary
Open interest, funding, liquidation, depth, spread, net flows — only the terms you actually hit while reading explanations.
Browse by layer
All 16 articles fall into one of six categories. The colour bar and code at the top of each article is its category.
L1 Supply
L2 Macro
S Getting started
One: no price predictions. No direction calls, no targets, no “what happens next”. Two: no forecasts dressed up as explanations. “Every halving has been followed by X, so this time…” is a forecast wearing a fact's clothes. Three: no timing advice. We explain up to “now you know why it moved”. The decision is yours.