Why Crypto Prices Differ Between Exchanges

Compare the price of a coin on our site with the price in an exchange app and you will often see a small difference. That is not an error. There is no single official price for a cryptocurrency — only the prices at which it trades on hundreds of separate venues.

Many markets, not one

A company’s shares usually have a primary listing on a specific stock exchange. Cryptocurrencies trade simultaneously on many independent exchanges around the world, each with its own order book of buyers and sellers. Each exchange’s price is simply the level at which its own customers most recently traded.

Those prices stay close to one another because traders constantly look for differences to exploit, but they are rarely identical.

Why prices diverge

• Liquidity. On an exchange with fewer buyers and sellers, a single large order can push the price further than it would on a busy one.
• Trading pairs. A coin may trade against US dollars on one exchange, against euros on another and against a stablecoin such as USDT on a third. If that stablecoin drifts slightly away from $1.00, prices quoted in it drift too.
• Access and capital controls. Some exchanges mainly serve a single country. When money cannot move freely across a border, local prices can sit persistently above or below the global average — a gap often called a premium.
• Speed. In fast-moving markets, some exchanges update a fraction of a second later than others.
• Fees and withdrawal limits. If it is slow or costly to move coins between two exchanges, a price gap can persist because closing it is not worth the trouble.

Arbitrage keeps prices close

Arbitrage means buying on the cheaper exchange and selling on the more expensive one. Arbitrage traders, many of them automated, narrow price gaps until what remains is roughly the cost of trading and moving funds. That is why differences between the largest exchanges are usually small.

How an aggregated price is built

Data providers such as CoinGecko, which supplies the prices on Leveraged Weekly, collect prices from many exchanges and combine them into one figure. In broad terms, venues where more trading happens carry more weight, and markets that look unreliable or far out of line can be filtered out. The result is a single reference price for the market as a whole rather than for any one exchange.

An aggregated price is a good guide to what a coin is worth, but it is not necessarily a price you can trade at. If you buy, you get your exchange’s price, plus any fees.

Spread and slippage

Two more terms explain why your trade may differ from the price on screen:

• The spread is the gap between the highest price a buyer is offering and the lowest price a seller is asking. Busy markets have tight spreads; thin markets have wide ones.
• Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you got. It happens when an order is large enough to work through several price levels in the order book.

Both tend to be larger for coins with low trading volume, which is another reason to check volume before trading a smaller coin.

Putting it into practice

Use our live table to compare coins and follow the market as a whole, and use your exchange’s own quote when you are about to trade. A difference of a fraction of a percent is normal. A persistent large difference usually has an explanation — a stablecoin depeg, capital controls or a very thin market — and is worth understanding before you act on it.