Why do crypto prices differ between exchanges?

There is no single official price for a cryptocurrency. The figure you see on a chart or a data site is usually an average across many exchanges. Each exchange, however, has its own order book, its own customers and its own fee model, so the price you can actually buy at differs from one place to the next.

The market on each exchange

An exchange matches buyers and sellers in an order book. The lowest price at which someone is willing to sell is the ask; the highest price someone will pay is the bid. Because the people trading on Kraken are not the same as those on OKX, the bid and ask move independently. Arbitrage traders buy where it is cheap and sell where it is dear, which keeps the gap small for large coins, but rarely at zero.

Brokers work differently: they quote you a price themselves rather than showing an order book. The difference is explained in crypto exchange vs broker.

The spread

The spread is the gap between the buy and sell price. In a busy order book it can be tiny. In a simple buy-button app, the platform usually sets its own price with a margin built in. Several large platforms do not publish that margin, which is why we measure what you receive rather than trusting a headline fee.

Slippage on larger orders

A market order takes the cheapest sell orders first and then moves up the book. For €100 of bitcoin that hardly matters. For €10,000 of a smaller coin, the average price can end up noticeably higher than the first quote. A limit order protects you from that, at the cost of not knowing whether it will be filled.

Fees and payment methods

On top of the price come trading fees, sometimes split into maker and taker rates, and charges for how you pay. Card payments in particular can add several per cent; see buying crypto with a credit card. A platform with a slightly better price can still be more expensive overall once its card fee is included.

Which price should you look at?

The amount of crypto you receive for your euros, after everything. That is exactly what our comparer calculates: it simulates your purchase against each licensed exchange's live order book or quoted price, applies the fees for your chosen payment method, and ranks platforms by what lands in your account. The method is set out in how we compare, and the best crypto exchange in Europe page shows which platforms came out cheapest across a basket of coins.

You can also check a single platform's costs on its fee page, for example Kraken fees or Coinbase fees. For a specific coin, start from its page, such as buy bitcoin, where the comparer is preset to that coin.