Under the price Order books, depth and slippage
A market price summarizes an order book: bids stacked below, asks above, each with a size attached. The gap
between best bid and best ask is the spread, and it is the first cost you pay on any trade, before a single
fee is charged. On BTC/USD it is usually a few dollars; on a smaller pair at a quiet hour it can be several
times wider, and the table will not warn you.
Depth decides your real fill price
Depth is how much size sits within a given distance of the mid price. If only $40,000 of asks rest within 0.1%
of the mid and you send a $200,000 market order, you eat that layer and keep climbing. The gap between the
price you saw and the average price you got is slippage: nobody charges it, and it is often larger than the
fee.
Three habits reduce it. Use limit orders when you are not in a hurry, since a resting order adds depth instead
of removing it and earns the cheaper maker rate. Split large orders across time. And check the volume column
before you size up: a pair doing $28.4B a day absorbs size that a pair doing $612M will not.
Exchange bookkeeping is not on-chain settlement
While assets sit on the platform, trades settle in our ledger rather than on a blockchain, which is what makes
matching instant. Settlement goes on-chain the moment you withdraw, and the rules in the original
Bitcoin whitepaper take
over: confirmations, finality, irreversibility. Our
custody controls cover the first half of that journey;
how it works covers the second.