SuperEx Educational Series: Understanding How Much Buying and Selling Pressure Can a Market Actually Handle
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I’m sure many of you have wondered about this before: How much money does it actually take to crash a market?
In the previous article, we discussed why crypto assets experience distinct bull and bear cycles. That naturally leads to a practical question: how much capital does it take to move a market significantly?
The standard social-media answer is usually: “A whale entered the market,” or “Large holders are dumping.”
That sounds dramatic, but it does not answer the question. A $100,000 order may move a small token by tens of percent while barely affecting Bitcoin.
The same token may behave differently at different times. During thin overnight liquidity, one sell order may consume the book. During active trading, the same amount may be absorbed quietly without producing a dramatic candle.
A market’s ability to absorb pressure is therefore never a fixed amount.
It depends on order-book depth, AMM reserves, bid-ask spreads, market-maker inventory, execution speed, and whether new liquidity returns after the initial shock.
What Exactly Is a Market’s Capacity to Absorb Buying and Selling Pressure?
Market absorption capacity can be understood as the amount of aggressive buying or selling a market can absorb without an excessive price change.
The acceptable level of price movement must be defined first.
If the question is how much selling the market can absorb without falling more than 1%, the answer can be estimated from cumulative bids within 1% below the current price.
If a 5% decline is acceptable, the market can naturally absorb more selling.
A market should not simply be described as capable of handling one million dollars. A more useful statement is how much it can absorb under current liquidity conditions while keeping price impact within a defined range.
Buying and selling pressure are not necessarily symmetrical.
Buying consumes asks and token inventory, while selling consumes bids and quote assets such as USDT. A market may contain plenty of tokens for sale while lacking enough stablecoin capital to absorb selling.
Saying that a market has good liquidity is therefore not enough. We must ask which side is liquid and whether it can absorb buying, selling, or both.
In an order-book market, aggressive orders consume available liquidity level by level.
Suppose a token currently trades at 1 USDT and has the following bids:
There are 20,000 USDT of bids near 1.00, another 30,000 USDT near 0.99, 50,000 USDT near 0.97, and 100,000 USDT near 0.94.
If someone sells 10,000 USDT worth of tokens, the highest bid may absorb the entire order with little price movement.
A 60,000 USDT sell order would consume all bids near 1.00 and 0.99 and continue executing around 0.97.
The last traded price may fall by roughly 3%, while the average execution price remains above 0.97. The last price, lowest execution price, and average execution price are different numbers.
If the order size reaches 200,000 USDT, existing bids may be consumed across much lower levels, causing substantially greater price impact.
This is why a market order prioritizes execution but cannot guarantee that the entire order fills at the price initially displayed.
According to SuperEx’s published trading rules, market orders execute against the best available orders. When their size exceeds the quantity at the best level, they continue into subsequent price levels.
To measure order-book capacity, cumulative depth matters more than the best bid and ask alone.
The best bid may display an attractive price while containing only 500 USDT. It proves that a quote exists, not that meaningful depth exists.
An order book displays current orders, not permanent commitments.
Market makers and ordinary users can cancel unfilled limit orders. The book may appear deep during calm conditions, while liquidity providers cancel orders or widen spreads when volatility rises.
Visible liquidity is not always the same as reliable executable liquidity.
Some orders are far from the current price and become active only after a substantial decline. They increase total displayed depth but offer little protection near the current market.
Some abusive traders may repeatedly place and cancel orders to create false depth, making the market appear to have stronger demand or supply than it really does.
Reliable liquidity should therefore be evaluated by whether orders remain during stress and how quickly they return after being consumed.
This is market resilience, or recovery capacity.
The same order book may absorb $500,000 of selling in the morning but struggle with $50,000 after unexpected news. The mathematics did not suddenly change. The willingness to provide liquidity did.
AMMs do not use traditional order books, but they still have market depth and price impact.
In a common constant-product model, tokens and USDT are placed in the same liquidity pool, and each trade changes the reserve ratio.
Suppose a pool contains one million tokens and one million USDT, producing an initial price of approximately 1 USDT.
If a user sells 100,000 tokens into the pool, a simplified model that ignores fees would return approximately 90,909 USDT.
The average execution price is approximately 0.909 USDT, while the post-trade marginal price falls further. The order not only executes, but also changes the price facing the next trader.
If the pool instead contains ten million tokens and ten million USDT, selling the same 100,000 tokens has a much smaller effect on reserve ratios.
This is the core of AMM absorption capacity. The deeper the pool, the smaller the order relative to total reserves and the lower the expected price impact.
Total pool value is not the only relevant metric. The balance between both assets also matters.
As users continue selling, the pool accumulates tokens and loses USDT. Even if the pool still displays a high total value, the quote reserves available to absorb further selling may have declined substantially.
In plain English, an AMM may not simply say that an order cannot execute. It may instead warn you through increasingly unfavorable prices that the pool’s absorption capacity is being depleted.
Why Does Selling Gradually Produce a Completely Different Result from Selling All at Once？
Market pressure depends not only on total size, but also on the speed at which orders reach the market.
A one-million-dollar market sell order immediately consumes available bids. The market has no time to wait for new buyers, arbitrageurs, or market makers to replenish liquidity.
If the same amount is spread across several hours, bids may return after each execution and market makers can adjust quotations according to inventory.
A market absorbs net buying or selling pressure per unit of time, not merely total daily volume.
This is why a market with $100 million of daily volume cannot necessarily absorb a $100 million market order at once.
Volume is the sum of completed trades and may include heavy two-way activity. Net selling pressure means sell demand persistently exceeds incoming buy demand.
A market can have very high volume while continuing to fall because transactions are being completed at progressively lower prices.
Why Can Leveraged Liquidations So Easily Overwhelm a Market?
Ordinary sell orders usually result from active decisions. Traders can choose timing, price, and execution method.
Liquidations are different. Their main objective is to reduce risk rather than wait for an attractive execution price.
When falling prices push many leveraged long positions into liquidation, the system may generate repeated sell orders within a short period.
The first liquidations push the price lower and trigger another group, creating a cycle of selling, decline, and additional selling.
More importantly, market makers and LPs may reduce exposure during extreme volatility. Orders are canceled, spreads widen, and AMM capital is withdrawn, reducing market capacity precisely when selling pressure is greatest.
Depth measured under normal conditions cannot be assumed to exist during market stress.
The real stress test is not how many orders exist in calm weather, but how much liquidity remains after conditions deteriorate.
How Can You Tell How Much Pressure a Market Can Withstand?
The first indicator is cumulative depth within different price ranges.
For example, traders can measure real bids and asks within 1%, 2%, and 5% of the current price. This helps estimate the impact of different order sizes.
The second indicator is expected slippage or average execution price.
The useful question is not merely whether an order can execute, but what the average price will be after the entire order is completed.
The third indicator is the bid-ask spread.
A sudden widening often means liquidity providers believe market risk is increasing.
The fourth indicator is liquidity-recovery speed.
If two-sided quotations return within seconds or minutes after a large trade, the market has stronger resilience.
The fifth indicator is liquidity concentration.
If most depth comes from one market maker, one LP, or a few accounts, displayed liquidity may look strong while withdrawal risk remains high.
Finally, liquidity across venues should be examined. If a token has genuine liquidity on several CEX and DEX markets, arbitrageurs can distribute some of the pressure. If nearly all trading depends on one small pool, risk is more concentrated.
An Example: Why Can Selling the Same 500,000 USDT Produce Completely Different Results?
Suppose Token A and Token B both trade at 1 USDT and each reports ten million USDT of daily volume.
At first glance, their liquidity appears similar.
Token A has 800,000 USDT of bids within 1% below the current price, several market makers replenishing quotes, and active markets across three venues.
Token B has only 50,000 USDT of bids within 1%, most of its volume comes from a few accounts, and its liquidity is concentrated in one AMM pool.
A 500,000 USDT sale of Token A may cause some slippage, but new bids, arbitrage capital, and market-maker quotations can gradually absorb it.
The same sale in Token B may rapidly consume both bids and the pool’s USDT reserves, causing a much larger decline.
The two tokens report the same volume but have very different absorption capacity.
Evaluating liquidity from daily volume alone is like judging a restaurant only by how many meals it served today while ignoring what remains in the kitchen.
Using SuperEx as an Example: How Do Order Books and AMMs Work Together to Increase a Market’s Capacity to Absorb Pressure?
In SuperEx spot and Free Market trading, liquidity may come from user limit orders, professional market makers, and Free Market AMM pools.
According to SuperEx’s published AMM mechanism, the platform connects AMM pools with the order book, allowing tokens and USDT provided by projects and users to contribute to market depth.
The order book displays buying and selling intentions across price levels, while the AMM can continuously generate quotations from pooled assets. Combining the two reduces dependence on one market-making team.
SuperEx AMM still cannot provide unlimited absorption. Slippage may increase when USDT reserves decline, LPs withdraw capital, or the token faces concentrated selling.
The platform also monitors trading-pair liquidity and order-book conditions. According to the SuperEx Free Market documentation, pairs with persistently weak liquidity, low activity, or significant risks may face risk-control measures or removal.
Such measures cannot prevent normal price movements, but they can reduce the risk that a market with little genuine trading capacity continues to create the appearance of liquidity.
Conclusion: How Much Pressure a Market Can Handle Depends on How That Pressure Arrives
There is no fixed answer to how much buying or selling pressure a market can absorb without considering time, acceptable price movement, and liquidity structure.
For order-book markets, cumulative depth, spreads, and replenishment speed matter. For AMMs, pool size, reserve balance, and order size relative to reserves are critical.
The same amount executed at once may produce a very different result from execution spread across several hours. Depth during normal trading is also different from depth during liquidation-driven panic.
Volume shows how much trading occurred in the past. Depth shows whether the market can absorb the next trade. Recovery capacity shows whether it can continue functioning afterward.
Sources
SuperEx Educational Series: Understanding On-chain Order Book
SuperEx Educational Series: New Tokens and Free Market AMM
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