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Digital Assets - Crypto

Spot Trading, Order Books, and AMMs

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This lesson compares the two ways a price actually forms when you trade crypto on the spot market: the order book used by centralised exchanges, and the automated market maker (AMM) used by most decentralised exchanges. Both let you swap one asset for another, but they form prices through completely different machinery, and each makes you pay a cost for trading in size. We build the order book from an everyday auction, put numbers on its slippage, then set it against the constant-product AMM from the DeFi lesson, with numbers on its price impact too. Knowing which mechanism you are trading against, and how each punishes size, is bread-and-butter execution knowledge for a crypto desk.