What is a trading pair?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 3 min
In short
A trading pair states which asset is being bought or sold and which one prices it, written as two tickers such as BTC/JPY. The first is the asset traded, the second is the yardstick. The same asset has a separate book and price in every pair.
Key points
- Written as two tickers, such as BTC/JPY
- The first is what you trade, the second prices it
- Each pair has its own book and its own price
- Which pairs exist differs by exchange
Definition
A combination that lets one asset be traded against another. The ticker before the slash is the base currency, the one after it is the quote currency.
BTC/JPY means buying and selling Bitcoin against Japanese yen, and the quoted price is what one Bitcoin costs in yen. BTC/USDT prices the same Bitcoin in Tether. Only the yardstick changes; the asset is identical.
What matters is that each pair has its own order book. Orders sitting in BTC/JPY never appear in BTC/USDT, so converting one price into the other at the spot FX rate leaves small discrepancies — larger ones where the book is thin.
Which pairs an exchange offers is a business decision. Japanese venues centre on yen pairs, overseas venues on stablecoin pairs. An asset can be listed and still have no pair against the currency you actually want to settle in.
Watch out for
- · Check price and fees separately for each pair, even for the same asset
- · In thin pairs an order may fill only partially
- · Stablecoin-quoted pairs also carry the stablecoin's own price movement