Crypto Market Structure and Venues

This lesson is the map of where crypto actually trades and why that map looks nothing like a stock market. Crypto runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across dozens of independent venues with no central exchange and no single official price. We cover how the market is fragmented, the two structural types of venue (centralised and decentralised), the split between spot and derivatives, and the fiat on and off ramps that connect crypto to the banking system. The single most important consequence, that the same asset can trade at different prices in different places at the same moment, is the reason arbitrage is central to crypto trading, and it sets up the rest of Module 2 and all of Module 3.