Leverage tier

A leverage tier is defined purely by the multiple applied to a position's margin, and a liquidation heatmap breaks down open exposure by tier at every price level, so you can see not just how much leverage sits near the current price but how concentrated it is in the riskiest, highest-multiple bands.

The higher the tier, the tighter the liquidation trigger, and the more forceful the resulting cascade tends to be once it starts, since every position in that tier is sitting close to its breaking point at the same time. A heatmap showing most of the nearby exposure concentrated in 50x and 100x tiers, rather than spread across 5x and 10x, implies a more fragile setup: a smaller move is enough to start a chain reaction. Positions in low tiers act more like a buffer, since it takes a much larger move to reach them.

Knowing the leverage tier of stacked positions doesn't tell you the direction the next move will come from, only how sensitive the market is once it does. It also can't account for traders adding margin to their position mid-trade to push their own liquidation price further away, which shifts real exposure without showing up as a change in the mapped tier until the next snapshot. And venues vary in exactly where their maintenance margin thresholds sit within a nominal tier, so the precise trigger price is always an estimate, not a guaranteed number. A heatmap also can't tell you how many of those positions are hedges against a spot holding elsewhere, which would make an apparent liquidation risk far less dangerous to the trader holding it than the tier alone suggests.

Ethereum trades at $3,500. A trader running 100x leverage on a long needs price to hold above roughly $3,465 to survive, a move of under 1%. A trader running 10x leverage on the same long has room down to about $3,185, a cushion nearly seven times wider. When a heatmap shows a heavy 100x-tier cluster sitting just below spot, that's a market one small dip away from a fast liquidation event, even if the 10x tier below it looks completely calm.