Crypto Infrastructure
The price on the screen is not the price you pay.
Between the number you tap and the amount that reaches your own wallet, several separate charges run in the background. None of them is hidden. None of them is on the price tag either.
The problem
Buy at a displayed 100. Follow it to your wallet.
Four gates sit between the number on screen and the amount you end up holding. Press through them one at a time and watch a slice come off at each — and notice who takes it.
One purchase, four layers
ILLUSTRATIVE MODELNothing has been charged yet. Press Follow the money to take the first slice.
The rates and amounts here are a model built to show the layers, nothing more. They are not any venue's real fee schedule and not a real gas price.
None of those four is hidden and none of them is a trick — they are simply charged at different levels. The spread comes out of the order book, the trading fee from the venue, the network fee from the blockchain itself, and the withdrawal fee from the platform when you move funds off it. The displayed price only ever describes the first of them, which is why the real price shows up in the settlement rather than on the button you pressed.
Two of the four slices scale with the size of the purchase. Two of them do not. The network fee and the platform's own withdrawal share are flat amounts, so on a purchase of 20 they cost exactly what they cost on 100 — and eat a far bigger share of it. That is why small transactions can be disproportionately expensive: not because anyone charges more, but because a fixed cost is a larger slice of a smaller number.
The definition
Three things the settlement teaches you.
Tap each card for what is actually going on behind the number.
Hands on
Three levels. Which one is this?
Every fee arises somewhere different. Tap each situation and sort it into the level it belongs to: trading fee, withdrawal fee, or network / gas fee.
When a trade is executed — often split into maker and taker
TRADING FEEThree levels, and together they make up the real cost — with the spread running underneath all of them.
The bridge
Where the costs sit, on each kind of venue.
Centralised and decentralised venues charge in different places — and one of them has a cost that changes by the hour.
Every slice in this lesson had somebody on the other end of it: an order book, a venue, a network, a platform. One cost factor is still missing — the difference between the price you were quoted and the price your order actually got. That one has nobody collecting it, which is exactly what makes it a different animal. It is the next lesson: slippage.
Check yourself
Five questions.
Answers come straight from this lesson. Submitting completes it.