One coin, different prices
The same coin at the same moment is worth different amounts in different places. That is not a glitch and not an oddity, it is the normal state of a market with no centre.
- Order book
- The list of every resting buy and sell order with its price. All trading happens inside it: your buy is filled against somebody's resting sell.
- Spread
- The distance between two prices: between the best buy and the best sell in one book, or between two venues.
- Legs of a trade
- The two halves of one operation: bought here, sold there. Both have to be counted — the round trip decides the result, not the entry.
- Capacity
- How much money actually fits into a given trade before the price runs away. The main question behind almost any find, and the least pleasant one.
- Ticker
- A coin's short name in trading. It is not unique: two entirely different projects can carry the same ticker on two venues.
- Routes under watch
- 341
- Gaps open
- 29
- Updated
- 6 minutes ago
Why it happens
Every venue has its own book and its own people in it. No single price exists anywhere — there is only what is resting in a particular book right now. That prices usually look alike is the result of work, not a law of nature.
The work is done by people buying cheaper and selling dearer at the same time. They need money on both sides, time, and a way to move the coin. Wherever one of those is missing, the difference lives: thin coins, young contracts, closed withdrawals, venues nobody watches.
Which produces the property that breaks most finds: the larger the difference, the less money fits into it. The most impressive percentages almost always sit on the emptiest book. So the thing to compute is not the percentage but the capacity — how much you can actually turn over before the price runs away.
And both legs have to be counted. The entry often looks rich: cheap here, dear there. But the result is set by the full round trip, and the second half tends to eat most of the headline.
How people use it
- Look at how far the difference is from normal for that pair, not at how big it is: plenty of pairs are always wide, and that tells you nothing.
- Price the whole round trip, not the entry.
- The question is not "how many percent" but "how much money fits". The answer is usually several times smaller than the headline.
Where it breaks
The biggest difference often turns out not to be a difference at all: a ticker is not unique, and two different coins can live under one name on two venues. Before being impressed by a percentage, make sure the two things being compared are the same thing — if the prices differ by multiples rather than percent, they are not.
What we track here
- Scans the venues continuously and keeps a baseline for every pair, so the signal is "this pair left its own normal" rather than "this number is large".
- Prices both legs of the round trip instead of the entry, and stores the result next to the headline.
- Measures how much money fits at the quoted prices before the book runs out.
- Checks that the two sides are the same asset, which sometimes they are not — the price ratio gives that away immediately.
- Pairs that are permanently wide stop distracting you, because they never come back to zero.
- The number you see is what a full round trip would have done, not what the entry looked like.
- Capacity arrives together with the spread, so you know whether it is worth the click before you make it.