Depth right now is the number everyone quotes, and on its own it cannot distinguish between three completely different situations: a pool that has been that size for a month, a pool that doubled this morning, and a pool that has lost half its depth since yesterday and is still going.
Those are not variations on a theme. They are three different risk profiles wearing the same number.
Why almost nobody shows you the flow
Because it does not exist as data unless somebody stored it. Public pool endpoints serve a snapshot — the state now — and they have no memory. Ask what a pool’s depth was last Tuesday and there is no answer available anywhere, at any price. It was never written down.
Which produces an unusual property for a market data series: it cannot be backfilled. Most gaps in most datasets can be repaired later by buying history from someone who kept it. Here there is no such vendor, because the source itself is stateless. A pass that was not collected is gone permanently.
That is the whole reason the on-chain half of the NoVo Crypto Market Map stores every pass rather than querying on demand. The history is the product; the endpoint is a commodity anyone can hit.
What the direction actually tells you
Liquidity arriving means providers are choosing to take the exposure described in impermanent loss on this token, at these prices. It is a commitment of capital that can be withdrawn at any moment and has not been.
Liquidity leaving is the more urgent read, because it changes the cost of your exit while you hold the position. Depth departing during a move is the ordinary consequence of provider economics rather than a conspiracy — but ordinary or not, it means the pool you sized against is not the pool you will be selling into.
The honest caveat
Neither direction is a prediction of price, and treating it as one is the fastest way to misuse it. Liquidity leaving does not mean a token will fall; plenty of tokens have drained depth and gone up. What it reliably tells you is that your round trip is getting more expensive, which is a statement about your risk rather than about direction — and, per slippage versus price impact, the round trip is the number that decides the trade.