Crypto exchange
A venue where cryptocurrency is swapped for other coins or for money around the clock. Unlike a conventional exchange, it also holds its clients' funds itself and records their trades in its own internal database.
A crypto exchange is a trading venue that matches buy and sell orders for cryptocurrency and, at the same time, takes client funds into custody and records the results of trades in its internal ledger. Formally, it combines functions that on a regulated market are split between separate organisations: the exchange itself matches orders, the broker provides access, and the depository holds the assets. Here a single legal entity does all of this, and it is often registered somewhere other than where the client lives.
How the trading works
Trading runs through an order book for each pair: a coin against another coin or against a unit of money. Orders are matched by price and time of arrival, and the trade is recorded instantly, yet not a single coin moves on the distributed ledger — only the rows in the platform's internal database change. A transaction reaches the network only on withdrawal to an external address, and the platform charges a separate fee for that withdrawal.
Two consequences follow from this. First: while the assets sit on the platform, it is the platform that controls them, not the holder — the client has no private key. Second: each platform has its own liquidity, and the order books are not pooled, so the price and the spread for one and the same coin differ from venue to venue, while trading goes on without weekends and without limits on the daily price move.
An example on the site's data
The list of coins with the largest market capitalisation is where turnover on crypto exchanges is most densely concentrated; beyond the first few lines the order book thins out quickly.
| # | Security | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTCBitcoin | 1,661.90 bn USD |
| 2 | ETHEthereum | 304.67 bn USD |
| 3 | USDTTether | 184.11 bn USD |
As of trading date: 10/10/2026
Where the word "exchange" misleads
The main substitution is carrying over the habits of an organised market. A crypto exchange has no external custodian of assets, no clearing through a central counterparty and no guarantee fund: when withdrawals are halted, the client's claim turns into a claim against a private company. Trading halts, the revaluation of collateral and the liquidation of positions in margin services are carried out under the platform's own rules, which the platform itself is entitled to change.
The second common mistake is to assume that what is traded there is digital currency in the legal sense, and that the status of the venue is equivalent to that of an information system operator, through which a digital financial asset is issued. These are different regimes: the first has no issuer and no obligated party, the second does. Access to instruments with a variable outcome is capped by volume for those who have not obtained qualified investor status: the annual limit on purchases of digital currency from a single intermediary is RUB 300,000.