We simulated $100K–$1M sell orders on 9 exchanges. Here's what your trade actually costs
Most traders compare fees. Almost nobody compares slippage — the hidden cost that hits the moment your order is big enough to move the book. We sampled order books every 30 minutes for a month (Aug 16 – Sep 14). Five things you should know: 1️⃣ BTC is cheap to trade almost everywhere. A $100K BTC spot sell order costs ~0% median slippage on Binance, and ≤0.005% on MEXC, KuCoin, OKX and Bitget. Execution has never been this good. 2️⃣ ETH is where venues separate. At $500K, Binance holds 0.018% median while some venues run 5-10x higher. Same trade, very different bill. 3️⃣ Watch the P90, not just the median. Median = your average day. P90 = your bad day. On $500K BTC futures, five exchanges tie at 0.001% median, but Binance's 0.004% P90 means its worst fills stay closest to its best. 4️⃣ Order books got MUCH deeper. Near-touch spot depth is up ~47% in two months. Futures: MEXC leads close to mid-price ($21M), Bitget dominates the wider band ($41.6M). 5️⃣ Gold & silver on CEXs just 3x'd. XAU/XAG futures depth tripled this quarter, Binance and MEXC are nearly tied at the touch, and silver is the fastest-moving battleground. Bottom line: fees are public, slippage is not. At size, venue choice can cost — or save — you more than the fee schedule ever will. Source: TokenInsight Crypto Exchange Liquidity Report · Sep 2026 💬 Do you check slippage before sizing up a trade, or just the fee tier? Tell us below.
TokenInsight TradFi Weekly #003: What Are Your Stocks Worth When the Market Is Closed?
The U.S. stock market was closed for three days last week. But prices for names like NVDA, TSLA, and AMD didn’t really stop moving. On the other side of the market, perpetual contracts tied to these stocks kept trading around the clock. By Sunday night, some were trading nearly 8% away from their Friday closes. Even more interesting: the biggest moves were concentrated in one sector…⬇️ Our data comes directly from the official APIs of 19 exchanges and covers Sep. 7–13. Market-wide figures cover the full TradFi perp universe, while single-asset volume and performance rankings are based on the 20 most actively traded TradFi perps. How big is the TradFi perp market now? TradFi perps generated $151.4B in volume across 19 exchanges last week, accounting for 18.3% of all futures volume. Gold alone, through XAU perps, traded $25.8B, or roughly 17% of the entire TradFi perp market. TradFi perps are no longer a niche corner of the derivatives market. Nearly $1 out of every $5 traded in futures last week went through them. But $151.4B is a weekly total. If this is truly a 24/7 market, there’s a more important question: Is the liquidity there 24/7 too? No. The perps trade 24/7. The money doesn’t. On a normal trading day, TradFi perps do roughly $32B in daily volume. But when U.S. equities are closed: Labor Day: $12.7B, or 11.6% of all futures volumeSaturday: $3.0B, or just 5.8% of all futures volume By Saturday, volume had fallen to roughly 1/10 of a normal weekday. In other words, these perps may trade around the clock, but activity still largely follows the rhythm of the U.S. stock market. So there are really two sides to “24/7”: You can trade 24 hours a day. That doesn’t mean there’s deep liquidity 24 hours a day. If a stock perp suddenly moves 5% over the weekend, the move itself isn’t enough. You also need to know how much liquidity was behind that price. Which brings us to the next question: Where is all that money actually trading? What is the money trading? These were the six most-traded TradFi perp contracts of the week: The top two alone accounted for roughly 30% of total volume. Crude oil was also among the week’s biggest gainers, rising nearly 8% as Middle East supply risks pushed oil prices higher. On the other side, the three biggest losers among the tracked contracts were: SNXX −23.4%, CRCL −12.2%, SNDK −12.2%. SNDK is worth watching. It was both the second-most-traded contract and one of the three worst performers of the week. The most heavily traded names aren’t necessarily the best-performing ones. And this becomes even more interesting over the weekend. Because that’s when the stock market itself stops giving you a price. So what are perps pricing when the stock market is closed? From Friday at 4:00 PM to Sunday at 8:00 PM ET, U.S. equities were closed. Stock prices were frozen at Friday’s close. Their perps kept trading. By Sunday night, here’s where they stood relative to Friday’s equity close: SPY: −0.4%GOOGL: −0.9%QQQ: −1.1%AMD: −3.0%MU: −4.0%SOXL: −7.9% The five deepest declines were all tied to semiconductors. Meanwhile, SPY barely moved, trading just 0.4% below its Friday close. So this wasn’t the perp market pricing a broad U.S. equity risk-off move. The selling pressure was concentrated in semiconductors. Here’s what makes it worth watching further: When U.S. overnight equity trading reopened at 8:00 PM ET on Sunday, these perps didn’t immediately retrace their weekend declines. That makes TradFi perps a potentially useful price window to watch the next time U.S. Equities are closed for the weekend. Then the Fed hiked. On Wednesday, the Fed raised rates by 25 bps, taking the federal funds target range to 3.75%–4.00% in a 12–0 vote. In the dot plot, 16 of 18 participants saw another rate hike before year-end, while the 10-year Treasury yield moved back above 5%. Here’s how markets traded that day: Which leaves us with a very direct question: After the rate hike, how will TradFi perps price the next window when U.S. equities are closed? Next week, we’re following two things. First: What happens to these TradFi perps after the rate hike? Second: When exactly do prices start moving during those 48 hours when U.S. equities are closed? If you hold U.S. stocks or trade equity perps, this is TokenInsight’s weekly dataset built for that gap. TradFi Weekly, updated every week. Full data and previous issues: tokeninsight.
Equity Perps Now Trade $17.6B a Day. But Weekends Tell a Different Story
Equity perpetuals are perpetual futures on stocks and equity-linked products, traded directly on crypto exchanges. The category has quietly become the second growth pillar of the perpetual market. Across Binance, Bybit, Bitget, MEXC and OKX, equity perpetuals averaged $17.6 billion in daily trading volume between July 1 and August 5, 2026. That puts them nearly level with ETH ($18.2B) and behind only BTC ($24.0B). On weekdays, average volume rises to $23.5 billion, moving ahead of ETH and approaching BTC. Here are the four findings that matter most. 1. The equity perps market is no longer a niche Demand for leveraged equity exposure on crypto-native venues has moved beyond experimentation. At $17.6B a day, equity perpetuals now trade roughly 4x commodity perpetuals ($4.5B) and sit within touching distance of the two crypto majors. 2. 24/7 by design, 9-to-5 in reality Weekend volume falls to just $2.3 billion, only 9.9% of weekday levels. Compare that with crypto: ETH retains 53.7% of its weekday volume on weekends, while BTC retains 44.4%. The reason is structural. Unlike crypto, equity perpetuals lack a live underlying reference market over the weekend, making price discovery and hedging materially harder for market makers. Until that changes, equity perps remain crypto-native in access but traditional in rhythm. 3. The listing race is peaking MEXC currently lists 310 equity perpetuals, Bitget 235, Binance 148, Bybit 147, and OKX 42. But as coverage converges, our data suggests the next phase of competition will be decided by liquidity depth, pricing quality and execution — not shelf space. 4. Execution quality is already diverging At a $10K order size, all five venues maintain median slippage below 0.02%, indicating a healthy execution environment. At $100K, dispersion emerges: different venues lead on different tickers, order-book depth varies between near-touch and wider bands, and tail execution risk (P90) increases materially. The per-ticker slippage rankings, position-limit comparisons across leverage tiers, and full depth data are in the complete report. Data from TokenInsight’s latest Equity Perpetuals Market Report. Follow TokenInsight for more crypto market structure research.
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