The Price of Crypto: How a Quote Is Actually Made

A crypto price is not published by anyone. It is the residue of an auction that never closes. Buyers post bids, sellers post asks, and the moment the two overlap a trade prints. That print is the last price, and it is the number almost every site displays.

The last price is a fact about the past. What you can actually transact at lives one level deeper, in the order book: the best bid is what a buyer will pay you right now, the best ask is what a seller wants, and the distance between them is the spread. Buy more than sits at the best ask and you walk up the book, paying progressively worse prices. That is slippage, and on thin markets it costs more than any fee.

Your order type decides which of those numbers you get. A market order accepts whatever the book offers and is filled immediately, spread and slippage included. A limit order names your price and waits, which removes slippage but adds the risk of never being filled. Most exchanges also charge the two differently: the order that waits usually pays a lower fee than the order that takes liquidity.

Candles are the book compressed into a picture. Each bar keeps four numbers — open, high, low and close — and throws away everything in between, including the depth that produced them. That is why long wicks matter: they are the trace of a price that existed briefly because someone crossed a thin book, not a level the market agreed on. Volume under the bar is what tells you which of the two it was.

Put those together and a quote is really three numbers, not one: the last trade, the spread around it, and the depth behind it. A price with no depth is a price that only existed for one order. Two exchanges quoting the same coin within a few basis points of each other but with very different volume are not telling you the same thing.

This site shows the pieces side by side — live price, source venue, volume, and the spread across every exchange that lists the pair — so the number is readable rather than merely displayed. What you do with it is your decision; nothing here is investment advice and no outcome is promised.