Crypto Order Blocks: The Last Opposite Candle Before a Break of Structure

A swing high on these pages is a daily candle whose high is above the highs of the five candles before it and not below the five after it; a swing low the same way with lows. It is only known five days later. A break of structure is a daily close above the newest unbroken swing high (or below the newest swing low): a BOS when it goes with the trend, a CHoCH (change of character) when it is the first break against it.

• Bullish block - when a close breaks a swing high, the down-close candle with the lowest low between that swing high and the breaking candle. Its high to low is the zone.
• Bearish block - the mirror: on a break of a swing low, the up-close candle with the highest high in between.
• Retest - price trades back into the block without closing through it. The page lists the first such day only: SMC treats an untouched (unmitigated) block as the one that matters.
• Broken - a daily close through the block's far side. It stops being an order block and becomes a breaker block.

On crypto the candles are IST days, so the "last opposite candle" is an IST day too. A trader using UTC daily candles can see a different block for the same break.

A bullish CHoCH block, and its first retest six weeks later

• On 16 September BTCUSDT closed at 76,015.09, below its 76,264 swing low: a bearish CHoCH. The trend was down.
• On 21 September it closed at 85,923.02, above the 82,300 swing high of 4 September: a bullish CHoCH.
• The lowest down-close candle between that swing high and the break was 16 September's: 74,967.97 to 76,950.96, the bullish order block.
• 30 October, first retest: the low of 76,500.11 traded into the block and the close of 76,918.91 held inside it. BTCUSDT was listed on Retest Bullish.
• On 6 November the low went to 74,888, under the block, but the close was 75,856.01. By 8 November there had been no daily close below 74,967.97, so the block was still open, with price sitting in it.

A bearish BOS block, rejected on its first retest

• On 30 October BTCUSDT closed below its 79,220.74 swing low of 24 October: a bearish BOS, with the trend.
• The up-close candle with the highest high between that swing and the break was 28 October's: 80,397.14 to 81,823. It was listed on New Bearish that day.
• 4 November, first retest: the high of 81,196.01 went into the block and the close was 80,600.01, inside it. Listed on Retest Bearish.
• The next candle (6 November; 5 November is missing) closed at 75,856.01.

On 30 October the page listed 20 rows: 11 new bearish blocks (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB, LINK, LTC and four others) and 9 first retests of older bullish blocks. When most of the majors break structure on the same day, the blocks are one market event seen eleven times, not eleven separate ideas.

1. Know which kind of break made the block. The Break column says BOS (with the trend) or CHoCH (the first break against it). A BOS block's retest is a continuation idea; a CHoCH block's retest is the first test of a possible turn.
2. Find what is on the other side. BTCUSDT's bearish block at 80,397–81,823 sat under the 81,971 untaken high; a long idea from the bullish block below had that block in its way.
3. Judge it on the daily close. Crypto wicks run far in thin hours. The page breaks a block only on a close through its far side, as BTCUSDT's 6 November candle shows.
4. Mind the weekend. A retest on a Saturday or Sunday may not appear at all if volume was under 0.8 × average; check the SMC Overview, which lists every open block without the filter.
5. Check positioning. A retest with open interest rising (fresh positions into the block) is a different day from one with it falling.

Risk per trade - risk a small, fixed share of capital on any one idea. Crypto never closes, so a stop is the only exit while you sleep; with leverage, keep the liquidation price well beyond the stop. When selling options, prefer defined-risk structures (spreads, iron condors) over naked positions.

These are ideas to study, paper-trade and backtest, not recommendations or signals, and not a promise of any result. Every condition below can fail. Crypto trades around the clock and can move sharply at any hour; leverage and options can lose more than you expect, and past behaviour says nothing certain about the next session. Size, entries, exits and risk are your own decisions.

1. The first retest, with the trend

• Setup: Retest Bearish on a pair whose trend is bearish (a BOS block), like BTCUSDT on 4 November; or Retest Bullish in an uptrend.
• Entry idea: a daily close back out of the block in the trend's direction.
• Invalidation: a daily close through the block's far side.

2. CHoCH blocks for turns

• Idea: a block left by a CHoCH marks a possible turn; its first retest is the SMC entry for the new direction.
• Caution: one CHoCH is one break. BTCUSDT's 21 September CHoCH was followed by a bearish CHoCH on 8 October.

3. Majors first on a market day

• Setup: a day like 30 October, when most pairs break structure together.
• Idea: trade the idea on BTC or ETH, where the blocks are cleanest, and treat altcoin blocks as the same event at a larger swing.

4. Weigh the volume

The Vol Ratio column shows how busy the retest day was; a quiet retest followed by a strong reaction reads better than a heavy day that slices into the block.

Test before you trade - write the rules down exactly, test them on past data (see how to backtest an options strategy and the Option Simulator, which supports crypto), then paper-trade at least 20 occurrences before committing real money. Keep a journal of every trade, including the ones you skipped.

Every Smart Money page has a Candles setting: Daily (the default) or Weekly. Weekly runs exactly the same rules on weekly candles built from the same IST daily bars. On crypto:

• A week is Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 IST, seven daily candles: Monday's open, the week's high and low, Sunday's close, the volume added up.
• The current week is the week so far. Its candle is dated the newest day, so on a Monday it is a one-day candle; a weekly row seen mid-week can change, or drop off, by Sunday's close.
• Dates in a weekly row are the week's last day: a Sunday, or the newest day for the current week.
• Counts become weeks: a swing needs five weeks on each side, ATR 14 is fourteen weeks, and every look-back counts weeks.
• What stays daily: the liquidity filter (the newest day's turnover and volume), LTP and change, and the Vol Ratio column.
• History: the scan pages build weeks from about 400 days of daily bars, so a weekly swing or zone there is at most about a year old. The SMC Overview reads up to about three years where the archive has them (158 weeks for BTCUSDT).

A weekly idea for order blocks: a weekly block is the last opposite week before a weekly break, a zone swing traders can see. BTCUSDT's weekly bullish block on 8 November ran from 58,115.01 to 65,622.83, left by the week to 28 June before the September CHoCH: far too wide to place a stop at its edge. Use a weekly block as the area, and a daily break inside it for the timing.

The tabs

• All - new blocks and first retests.
• Retest Bullish / Retest Bearish - the first return to an untouched block.
• New Bullish / New Bearish - a break of structure today made this block.

The columns

• Block Low / Block High - the block candle's range.
• Break - BOS or CHoCH, and Swing Broken - the level the close broke.
• Broke On - the date of the break.
• Size (ATR), Vol Ratio and the Event tag.
• Chart - the block shaded from its candle, the break marked, and the broken swing drawn.

Which pairs are scanned

• The live USDT pairs in Unfluke's crypto archive, from BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT to mid-caps such as GRTUSDT and THETAUSDT: 33 were scanned on 8 November 2026.
• Stablecoins are left out by behaviour: a pair whose average daily range over 20 days is under 0.25% (USDCUSDT's is a few hundredths of a percent) is not scanned. A day with under US$100,000 traded is skipped as untraded.
• The liquidity filter: a 20-day average turnover above US$500,000, and the day's volume above 0.8 times its 20-day average. Crypto has no price bands, so there is no circuit check.
• The universe box: All, Futures or Options (pairs that also have a perpetual future, or options, in the archive).

Three things that are different on crypto

• A day is an IST day. Each daily candle runs from 00:00 to 23:59 IST, rolled up from the one-minute spot archive (Binance data). Another chart that closes its days at 00:00 UTC (05:30 IST) will show different candles, and so different swings and zones.
• Weekends thin the lists. The 0.8 × volume test is the same as on NSE, but crypto trades every day and volume falls away at weekends. From 10 August to 8 November 2026 an average of 21.2 pairs passed on a weekday and 10.8 on a Saturday or Sunday; BTCUSDT itself was off the lists on 27 of 89 days, 21 of them weekends. On Sunday 8 November no pair passed and every list was empty. The SMC Overview has no liquidity filter, so a pair's zones are always there.
• Missing days. The archive has no candle for 5 August, 11 September or 5 November 2026, when the feed stopped. The candles on either side sit next to each other, and a swing count of "five days" can span six calendar days there.

The newest day can also be unfinished: the feed runs about a day behind, and the newest stored day is topped up until it is complete, so its volume, and with it the liquidity test, can change during the day.

Smart Money Concepts are a way of reading a chart, popularised by the trader known as ICT. There is no official rulebook and no published evidence that they work better than other methods, on crypto or anywhere else; the pages apply one fixed reading so a row can be checked by hand. They describe what price did, not what it will do.

Open the page at Smart Money → Order Blocks (switch the market to Crypto), or sign up free to open the Market Terminal.

The other crypto Smart Money guides: SMC Overview, Fair Value Gaps, Breaker Blocks, Liquidity Sweeps. The NSE version of this page, with its own worked examples, is explained in the Order Blocks guide. For what traders were doing in the futures market on the same days, see the OI Buildup guide and the Binance Futures guide.