Bid-ask spread
The bid-ask spread is the gap between the highest price a buyer will pay and the lowest price a seller will accept. A wider spread means a higher hidden cost every time you enter or exit a position.
Reading the spread
Binance Academy defines the spread as the difference between the lowest price a seller will accept and the highest price a buyer will pay, and calls it one of the simplest ways to gauge supply and demand. A narrow spread means buyers and sellers agree closely on price. A wide one means a bigger gap.
Spread and liquidity
The same source says spreads and liquidity move inversely. High-volume markets usually have narrower spreads because more buyers and sellers compete near the current price, while low-volume markets have wider spreads because there are fewer participants. A wider spread raises the cost of entering and exiting and is often linked to higher slippage on larger orders.
If you buy at the ask and immediately sell at the bid, the spread is the loss you take before any fees or price movement. On illiquid memecoins and small perpetual markets that loss can be large.
What to do with it
Check the spread before using a market order, and consider a limit order between the two sides if you are patient. On pool-based swap venues there is no visible book, so price impact and slippage play the same role, and a quote for a small trade may not hold for a larger one. Compare quotes at your real size, not a token amount.
Common mistakes
Beginners often compare only the headline trading fee between venues and ignore the spread, even though the spread can cost more than the fee on thin markets. Another mistake is judging the spread at a quiet moment and then trading during volatility, when spreads typically widen as liquidity thins.
Check the spread again right before you trade, and test with a small order if the market looks thin.
Where this shows up
- Hyperliquid — Perps traders outside the US who want onchain order-book trading from their own wallet, with fees that drop by volume and HYPE staking.
- dYdX — Non-US, non-UK, non-Canadian traders who want an open-source, order-book perps venue with volume-tiered fees.
- Coinbase — Beginners in the US, UK or EU who want a regulated, KYC'd on-ramp with bank funding, and who can trade onchain Base/Solana tokens in the same app.
- Jupiter — Solana traders who want aggregated routing across DEXes with low or zero fees on major and stable pairs.
- Uniswap — Traders and liquidity providers who want direct access to Uniswap pools across many EVM chains without an interface fee.
Sources
Last checked . Fees and terms change often; the venue's own page wins if it disagrees with ours.
- Bid-ask spread (Binance Academy) — checked 2026-10-17