Stellar Order Book & Live Trade Flow
The Stellar DEX keeps its order book on the public ledger, which means you can watch live bids, asks and executed trades for any pair in real time. Chartui turns that on-chain data into a fast, readable order book and a live trade-flow stream — the same kind of order-flow tooling active traders expect, built specifically for Stellar (XLM).
What is the Stellar order book?
An order book is the list of all resting buy and sell offers for a trading pair. On Stellar, those offers live on-ledger: the bids are the prices buyers are willing to pay, the asks are the prices sellers are willing to accept, and the gap between the best bid and best ask is the spread. Stacked up, the resting offers form market depth — a picture of how much size sits at each price level on either side of the market.
Reading depth tells you where liquidity actually is. A thick wall of bids below the price can act as support; a thin book means even a small order can move the price. Because Stellar's book is fully public, Chartui can show you this depth live, without any exchange deciding what to hide — and for many pairs the order book's liquidity is complemented by AMM liquidity pools.
What is live trade flow (time & sales)?
Where the order book shows intent (offers that haven't filled yet), trade flow shows what actually happened: a real-time stream of every executed trade, with price, size, side and time. Traders also call this the time & sales tape. Watching the tape tells you whether buyers or sellers are in control, when large prints hit, and how aggressively a move is being pushed.
Chartui's trade-flow widget streams Stellar trades as they settle on the ledger — roughly every five seconds — so you see prints the moment they happen rather than a delayed summary.
How to read the order book and the tape together
- Spread & depth: a tight spread with deep size on both sides signals a liquid, actively-quoted market.
- Absorption: if heavy trade flow keeps hitting a price level but the book there doesn't break, someone is absorbing the orders.
- Imbalance: a lopsided book plus one-sided trade flow often precedes a move toward the heavier interest.
- Large prints: outsized trades on the tape are worth noting — they often mark where bigger participants are active.
Why real-time matters
Order flow is only useful while it's fresh. A book or tape that's even a few seconds stale can hide exactly the move you're trying to read. Chartui is built around live Stellar data so the order book and trade flow you see match the state of the ledger right now. New to the network first? Start with our overview of the Stellar DEX, or learn how to read XLM charts to combine price with order flow.