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title: "What is tick data? Crypto tick data explained"
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# What is tick data? Crypto tick data explained
What is tick data? Every trade and order book change, one row each. See what candles drop, and why candle backtests guess whether stop or target hit first.
*0xArchive market data guide · tick data*

Tick data is the full record of a market: every trade and every change to the order book, one row per event, each with its own timestamp. A candle is what is left after you throw most of it away.

On [Hyperliquid](https://hyperliquid.xyz), the median 1-minute bitcoin candle from 17 August to 15 September 2026 stood for 149 trades. In minutes sampled at random from the same 30 days, the order book changed a median of 27,800 times, every change recorded by [0xArchive](https://0xarchive.io/).

![One Hyperliquid bitcoin minute. The candle is one down bar from 76,314 to 76,176. Beside it, 417 trade dots drop, bounce $43 and drop again. Below, bars show 75,411 order book changes, second by second.](https://api.0xarchive.io/cms-assets/2026/09/4920445e-9b96-4006-a059-3e91f62ee0e1.webp)

One busy minute: Hyperliquid BTC perp from 13:50:00 to 13:51:00 UTC on 15 Sep 2026, with more trades than 87% of minutes from 17 August to 15 September 2026. The candle opened at its high, 76,314, and closed at its low, 76,176. The 417 trades underneath it touched 97 prices and bounced $43 off a mid-minute low of 76,200 between 13:50:23 and 13:50:36. The order book changed 75,411 times in the same minute: 37,525 orders placed, 37,464 pulled and 422 resized.

## Tick data keeps every trade and every order book change on its own row

A tick is one event in a market. A trade is a tick. So is every order placed, resized or cancelled. Tick data, also called tick by tick data, keeps every one of them in the order it happened. Nothing is summed and nothing is sampled. Historical tick data is the same record, kept so you can replay any past minute event by event.

It comes in two streams. Trade ticks are the tape, what trading screens call time and sales: every fill with its price, its size and the side that crossed the spread. Book ticks are every change to the resting orders, and they are most of the data. In a random sample of Hyperliquid bitcoin minutes, book ticks outnumbered trades by a median of 159 to 1.

![Three cards with one real row each from the 13:50 UTC bitcoin minute on Hyperliquid: the candle, a trade tick naming the seller and buyer wallets, and a book tick with its block, sequence, order ID and wallet.](https://api.0xarchive.io/cms-assets/2026/09/948ebf4f-6f23-4f05-83e4-2cedd22c2b76.webp)

One real row of each kind from the Hyperliquid BTC minute at 13:50 UTC on 15 Sep 2026. The minute produced one candle, 834 trade rows and 75,411 book rows. The trade tick is the minute's biggest trade, 3.01676 BTC at 76,176, and it names the wallet on each side. The book tick is the first order change of the minute.

## Path dependency: a candle cannot say whether your stop or your target filled first

Say you are long at 100,000, with a stop at 99,950 and a target at 100,050. The next 1-minute candle trades from 99,940 to 100,060. Both levels traded, and the candle cannot say which came first.

That is path dependency. The result of the trade depends on the order prices traded in, and a candle keeps four prices without their order. A backtest has to guess, and the guess becomes part of the result. Guess the target every time and a losing strategy looks like a winner on paper.

![Illustration of one 1-minute candle with a stop and a target inside its range, beside two tick paths that print the same candle. The first path hits the target and wins $50 per BTC. The second hits the stop and loses $50.](https://api.0xarchive.io/cms-assets/2026/09/a6df1c98-efcf-4f29-bd39-caa8206ada23.webp)

Illustration: a long at 100,000 with a stop at 99,950 and a target at 100,050. Both tick paths print the same candle: open 100,000, high 100,060, low 99,940, close 100,020. Path 1 reaches the target first and makes $50 per BTC. Path 2 reaches the stop first and loses $50. A backtest that only sees the candle cannot tell them apart.

On real bitcoin candles it is not a corner case. On 1-hour Hyperliquid candles from 17 August to 15 September 2026, a stop and a target $50 either side of the open both traded inside the same bar 60.8% of the time. The wider the bar is compared to your stop, the more of your backtest is a guess.

| Hyperliquid BTC bar | $50 stop and target, both traded | $250 stop and target, both traded |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 minute | 0.9% of bars | Under 0.1% |
| 5 minutes | 10.0% | 0.1% |
| 15 minutes | 29.1% | 0.6% |
| 1 hour | 60.8% | 4.3% |

Tick data settles it, because the trades are in order. Limit orders have the same problem: whether yours would have filled depends on the queue in front of it, and only book ticks show the queue. The [Hyperliquid historical data guide for backtesting](https://0xarchive.io/resources/market-data-guides/hyperliquid-historical-data-api-for-backtesting) covers pulling both for a backtest.

## The median 1-minute bitcoin candle on Hyperliquid hides 149 trades

A candle is four prices and a volume. Across the 43,194 minutes from 17 August to 15 September 2026, the median Hyperliquid bitcoin candle stood for 149 trades. One minute in ten stood for 492 or more.

| Hyperliquid BTC minute | Trades | Book changes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Median, 17 Aug to 15 Sep 2026 | 149 | 27,800 |
| 13:50 UTC on 15 Sep 2026, in the figures | 417 | 75,411 |

Book changes come from 20 minutes drawn at random from the same 30 days. The minute in the figures is a busy one. Its book changed more times than in any of the 20.

Its candle reads as a straight line down. Its ticks show a $43 bounce in the middle and the wallets on each side of every trade.

| What you ask | A candle | Tick data, from the 13:50 minute |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price path | Open and close only | Every trade in order: 417 across 97 prices |
| Bounces | None visible | $43 off a low of 76,200, 13:50:23 to 13:50:36 UTC |
| Who crossed the spread | Not recorded | Sellers in 269 trades, buyers in 148 |
| Biggest trade | Not recorded | 3.01676 BTC sold at 76,176, 13:50:58.941 UTC |
| Order book | Not recorded | 37,525 orders placed, 37,464 pulled, 422 resized |
| Wallets | Not recorded | 274 traded, 387 placed or pulled orders |

## A Hyperliquid trade tick names the wallet on each side

A trade tick on a centralized exchange's public feed is a time, a price, a size and a side. Hyperliquid runs its order book on chain, so each trade comes out as two fills, one for each wallet. Each fill says whether that wallet was the taker or the maker, and whether it opened or closed a position.

So every trade arrives as two rows. Timestamps come from blocks, so many ticks share one: the 417 trades in the 13:50 minute landed on 159 distinct timestamps.

> A candle cannot say who traded. On Hyperliquid, every trade tick names both wallets.

## Book ticks follow each order from placement to cancel

A book tick is one change to one order: placed, resized or pulled. On Hyperliquid each one carries the order's ID, its price and size, the wallet behind it, and its block number and place in that block, so events that share a millisecond still have an order.

Replay book ticks from a snapshot and you rebuild the whole order book at any moment, down to single orders. That is L4 data, and [level 1 vs level 2 vs level 3 vs L4 market data](https://0xarchive.io/resources/market-data-guides/level-1-vs-level-2-vs-level-3-vs-l4-market-data) covers what each depth keeps. A candle records none of it.

## Bars on a tick chart close every 50 trades, not every minute

A tick chart starts a new bar after a fixed number of trades instead of a fixed amount of time. Busy stretches get more bars and quiet ones get fewer, so the chart spends its detail where the trading happened. You can only build one from tick data.

At 50 trades a bar, a median minute of 149 trades draws three bars. The busy 13:50 minute draws nine, and one of them closes up $31, the bounce its candle hid.

![The same Hyperliquid bitcoin minute as one down candle and as nine 50-trade bars. One bar closes up $31. A time strip below shows the first bar took 8.0 seconds and the eighth took 1.7 seconds.](https://api.0xarchive.io/cms-assets/2026/09/2852f041-9962-4d15-8ec3-a68937993b8a.webp)

Hyperliquid BTC perp from 13:50 to 13:51 UTC on 15 Sep 2026. Left, the 1-minute candle. Right, the same 417 trades cut into bars of 50, with the last 17 trades still forming a ninth bar. The fifth bar closes up $31, from 76,201 to 76,232. Underneath, the stretch of clock time each bar covers, from 8.0 seconds for the first to 1.7 seconds for the eighth.

## Bitcoin on Hyperliquid moves in $1 steps, and each step is also called a tick

A tick in trading has a second meaning: the smallest amount a price is allowed to move. That amount is the tick size, and one tick is one step of it. Tick data is named for events instead, and one event can move the price by many ticks or by none.

Hyperliquid sets tick size with significant figures instead of a fixed increment. Perp prices carry up to five significant figures, and whole-number prices are always valid, under [Hyperliquid's tick and lot size rules](https://hyperliquid.gitbook.io/hyperliquid-docs/for-developers/api/tick-and-lot-size). For bitcoin that means whole dollars.

## Ask a tick data provider whether it sells every book change or only snapshots

Crypto tick data can mean three different products on a provider's page, and the difference decides what you can do with it.

**1. Trades only.** The tape. Enough for tick charts, volume profiles and signals built on trades. Nothing about resting orders.

**2. Trades plus book snapshots.** A copy of the top of the book, taken every few hundred milliseconds or every few seconds. Everything between two snapshots is gone. Across the sampled minutes, the bitcoin book on Hyperliquid changed a median of 463 times a second.

**3. Every book change.** Every order placed, resized and pulled, in sequence. This is the only one you can rebuild the book from at any moment, and the only one that shows where your order would have sat in the queue.

Ask which one you are buying, how far back it goes, and whether the timestamps are the venue's or the vendor's. On Hyperliquid, ask whether each trade carries both wallets too. Hyperliquid's own API streams live trades and book updates. Keeping them for later means recording them as they happen, which is what an archive does.

## Hyperliquid tick data on 0xArchive goes down to every order's wallet

0xArchive records Hyperliquid at the deepest of the three: every trade with both wallets, and every book change at L4. [Lighter](https://lighter.xyz) is recorded fill by fill, with order-level L3 snapshots.

| Tick data | Hyperliquid | Lighter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Trade ticks | Every fill, with the wallet on each side and whether it opened or closed a position | Every fill, with maker and taker attribution |
| Book ticks | Every order placed, resized and pulled, with its wallet, from 2026-03-10 | Every resting order with its account number, up to 250 a side per snapshot, from 2026-03-05 |

The [Hyperliquid data API](https://0xarchive.io/hyperliquid) page lists every data family, and the [Hyperliquid order book data guide](https://0xarchive.io/resources/market-data-guides/hyperliquid-order-book-data-api) covers rebuilding the book from book ticks. For Lighter's fields, see the [Lighter L3 guide](https://0xarchive.io/resources/market-data-guides/lighter-historical-market-data).

## Common questions about tick data

**What is tick data?** Every trade and every order book change in a market, one row per event, each with its own timestamp. Candles, volume bars and snapshots are all summaries built from it.

**What is the difference between tick data and OHLC data?** OHLC data, or candles, keeps four prices and a volume for each window of time. Tick data keeps every event inside the window, so it shows the order prices traded in, which a candle cannot.

**What is path dependency in backtesting?** A trade is path dependent when its result depends on the order prices traded in, such as whether its stop or its target was hit first. Candles drop that order and tick data keeps it. On 1-hour Hyperliquid bitcoin candles from 17 August to 15 September 2026, a stop and a target $50 either side of the open both traded inside the same bar 60.8% of the time.

**How many trades are in a 1-minute bitcoin candle?** On Hyperliquid, a median of 149 from 17 August to 15 September 2026, with one minute in ten holding 492 or more.

**Is tick data the same as tick size?** No. Tick size is the smallest step a price can move, which is $1 for bitcoin on Hyperliquid. Tick data is the record of every market event.

**Where can you get Hyperliquid tick data?** Hyperliquid's API streams it live. 0xArchive keeps the history: every trade with the wallet on each side, and every L4 order book change since 2026-03-10.

## Run this analysis from an agent

Trades, candles and L4 book changes are all endpoints an agent can call. 0xArchive ships an [MCP server](https://docs.0xarchive.io/mcp-server), so Claude and other AI agents can pull tick data in plain language. There is a [Claude Code skill](https://docs.0xarchive.io/claude-code-skill) for terminal workflows and an [agentic gateway](https://docs.0xarchive.io/agentic-gateway) for agents that pay per call. Start with the [agent surfaces overview](https://docs.0xarchive.io/agent-surfaces) or the guide to [replayable market data for MCP, CLI and agent workflows](https://0xarchive.io/resources/market-data-guides/replayable-market-data-for-mcp-cli-and-agent-workflows).

## Route references

Use the [trades reference](https://docs.0xarchive.io/rest-api/trades) for trade ticks on Hyperliquid and Lighter, the [order book routes reference](https://docs.0xarchive.io/rest-api/order-books) for L4 book ticks and history, the [candles reference](https://docs.0xarchive.io/rest-api/candles) for time bars, and the [WebSocket L4 order book reference](https://docs.0xarchive.io/websocket/l4-orderbook) for streaming and replay. The [replay and reconstruction guide](https://docs.0xarchive.io/core-concepts/replay-and-reconstruction) covers rebuilding a book from book ticks.

For current API availability and plan details, use the [Hyperliquid data API](https://0xarchive.io/hyperliquid), [data catalog](https://0xarchive.io/data/catalog), [pricing](https://0xarchive.io/pricing), and [status](https://0xarchive.io/status).