Crypto markets have no closing bell, no consolidated tape, and no equivalent of the NBBO (national best bid and offer) obliging anyone to route an order to the best price. Prices form continuously, around the clock, across dozens of venues that do not clear into a common system, and the quote currency is usually a dollar stablecoin rather than a bank dollar. For a reader trained on equities or FX market structure the individual pieces will look familiar, order books, market makers, futures basis, but the assembly is different enough that importing the equities mental model wholesale is the fastest route to a bad first execution.
The CEX tier
Most price discovery happens on CEXs (centralised exchanges), which run conventional central limit order books and, unlike an equities exchange, also act as custodian, clearing house, and settlement venue for their users in one entity. Binance is the global volume leader, consistently the largest venue by spot turnover on CoinMarketCap's exchange rankings as of July 2026, with liquidity depth no other venue matches. Coinbase is the benchmark regulated venue, a Nasdaq-listed company and the default US institutional on-ramp. OKX, Kraken, and Bybit round out the venues a desk will hear quoted daily. The regional map matters as much as the global one: Upbit dominates Korea's bank-linked won market, bitFlyer is Japan's reference licensed venue, and in Hong Kong, HashKey and OSL hold the SFC (Securities and Futures Commission) virtual-asset trading platform licences, making them the venues a regulated APAC desk can actually face. The vertical integration deserves emphasis: an exchange holding client assets while operating the matching engine is precisely the structure securities regulation spent a century unbundling, and it is why counterparty due diligence on a CEX resembles bank credit work more than venue selection.
DEXs and the AMM model
The second tier is DEXs (decentralised exchanges), which are not companies but smart contracts running directly on chain. The dominant design, pioneered by Uniswap, is the AMM (automated market maker). There is no order book. Liquidity providers deposit two assets into a pooled contract, and the contract quotes prices from a formula, in the classic case constant-product: the pool must keep the product of its two reserves constant, so buying one asset out of the pool mechanically raises its price along a curve. The honest summary is that an AMM is a passive dealer with infinite uptime and no discretion: always quoting, never pulling its price, executing any size at a price the formula dictates, with larger orders walking further up the curve (price impact is explicit and computable in advance). For small size in liquid pairs the execution is remarkably good; for institutional size it is usually a way to announce your order to the world, since pending transactions are publicly visible before they settle.
The cash leg
The market's working cash is not bank money. The overwhelming majority of trading is quoted and settled against stablecoins, with USDT, issued by Tether, as the dominant global quote currency and USDC, issued by Circle, as the preferred instrument in regulated and US-facing contexts. This matters operationally: when a desk sells BTC "for dollars" on most venues it receives a tokenised dollar claim on a private issuer, not a deposit, and the credit and redemption mechanics of that issuer become part of the trade's risk. The stablecoin chapter covers those mechanics; the market-structure point is simply that in crypto the cash leg is itself an instrument with an issuer, a reserve, and a price that can wobble.
Market makers, OTC desks, and perps
The counterparties a bank actually faces are usually not exchanges but trading firms. Professional market makers (Wintermute, GSR, and a handful of peers) quote continuously across venues and account for much of visible liquidity. For institutional size, OTC (over-the-counter) desks such as Cumberland, FalconX, and the principal desks of the larger exchanges are the standard route: a request-for-quote model, one all-in price, no public order-book footprint, settlement bilaterally arranged. Functionally this is FX voice-and-RFQ market structure rebuilt for tokenised assets, and it is where most first institutional trades should happen.
Derivatives volume, meanwhile, dwarfs spot, led by an instrument with no TradFi twin: the perpetual future, a future that never expires. Instead of converging to spot at expiry, it is tethered by a funding rate, a periodic payment between longs and shorts (typically every eight hours) that pushes the contract price towards the index. When the perp trades rich, longs pay shorts, and vice versa. The funding rate is the market's observable cost of leverage, and treasury desks watch it the way rates desks watch repo: persistent positive funding signals leveraged long demand and sets the carry available from the classic cash-and-carry basis trade.
Fragmentation and best execution
Because these venues share no consolidated tape and no common clearing, "the price" of BTC is a construction, not an observation. Binance, Coinbase, an AMM pool, and an OTC quote can all differ at the same instant, and index providers publish blended reference rates precisely because no single venue is authoritative. Arbitrage keeps venues within a band, but the band widens exactly when it matters, in fast markets, and moving collateral between venues to capture a spread takes real time and real settlement risk.
For a bank desk routing its first order, best execution therefore has to be built rather than assumed. In practice that means measuring quotes against a reference index rather than a single venue's print, preferring RFQ against two or three OTC desks for size, treating any resting exchange balance as unsecured credit exposure to that exchange, and documenting the venue-selection logic, since no regulator-mandated routing obligation will do it for the desk. The habits transfer directly from FX best-execution policy; the difference is that here the venue is also the custodian, and the cash leg is also an asset.