The throttled feed
Several large venues deliberately limit their public liquidation streams — broadcasting on the order of one event per symbol per interval rather than every forced close. In a cascade, when hundreds fire per second, the feed reports a trickle. Aggregators sum these trickles into headline totals, which is why “record liquidation” days are records of REPORTED flow — the true figure is a multiple nobody outside the venues can compute.
Why venues do it, and what it preserves
The stated logic is protecting proprietary flow data; the effect is that levels are honest while magnitudes are not. Timing survives: throttled or not, the feed still says WHEN forced flow clustered and on which side. Relative comparisons survive within a venue’s consistent throttle. Absolute totals, and cross-venue comparisons of them, do not.
The reading posture
This is the general lesson of crypto data hygiene — the same one volume and TVL teach: know how each number is manufactured before weighting it. A floor with known bias is usable; a floor mistaken for a count is a trap.
Reading it
Use liquidation data for timing, side and clustering; never for magnitude claims or venue comparisons. When a headline total impresses you, remember it is the visible fraction of a larger event — which usually makes the read STRONGER, not weaker.