Crypto Markets 101

A crypto market is simply a venue where digital assets are bought and sold against other assets -- most often a stablecoin, a fiat currency, or another cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional equity markets, crypto markets never close: trading happens continuously across a global network of exchanges, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This has two direct consequences worth internalizing before anything else. First, price discovery never pauses -- there is no opening bell that resets sentiment overnight, which means volatility can arrive at any hour. Second, liquidity is fragmented across many venues rather than concentrated in one exchange, so the 'price' of an asset is really a convergence of prices across many order books, not a single authoritative number.