The Price Ladder Isn't the Same Everywhere: BTC Order Sizes Differ 10x Between Exchanges
Disclosure: This article was researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked against the official exchange APIs and documentation cited below. It contains no sponsored placements at the time of publication; if that ever changes, affiliate links will be clearly marked with #ad. Nothing here is financial advice — this is a measurement report, not a recommendation to trade, buy, or move funds.
Every limit order you place climbs a price ladder. The ladder's rung spacing — the "tick size" — is set by the exchange, not by you, and you cannot place an order price that sits between two rungs. What most traders never notice is that the same asset has different rung spacing on different exchanges. For bitcoin, we measured it: the minimum price increment for one and the same BTC market differs by a factor of ten across four major venues.
This matters more than it sounds. Tick size quietly decides three things: how tightly your limit order can hug the current market, how much of your order gets silently rounded, and how much "free" price improvement is even possible on a fill.
What we measured, and how
On 2026-09-04 (02:02 UTC) we queried the free, no-authentication public APIs of four exchanges and read the raw specification fields for BTC against USD or USDT. No third-party summaries, no blog posts — just the venues' own endpoints, which you can hit yourself with curl and reproduce the numbers.
| Venue | Endpoint | Field | BTC tick size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | /api/v3/exchangeInfo?symbol=BTCUSDT |
PRICE_FILTER.tickSize |
0.01 USD |
| Bybit | /v5/market/instruments-info?category=spot&symbol=BTCUSDT |
priceFilter.tickSize |
0.1 USD |
| OKX | /api/v5/public/instruments?instType=SWAP&instId=BTC-USDT-SWAP |
tickSz |
0.1 USDT |
| Kraken | /0/public/AssetPairs?pair=XXBTZUSD |
tick_size |
0.1 USD |
Four independent official sources, two distinct answers: 0.01 versus 0.1. That is a tenfold difference in how finely you can quote a price on what is nominally the same market — spot bitcoin in dollars.
We cross-checked reachability of each venue's own field documentation as a second layer: Bybit's instrument-specification documentation page (bybit-exchange.github.io/docs/v5/market/instrument) and OKX's API v5 reference (okx.com/docs-v5/en/) both returned HTTP 200 at measurement time and define these fields. The values above are static specification fields rather than market prices, so they are far more stable than the ticker snapshots we cite elsewhere in our work — but exchanges can and do amend specifications, so treat any number here as "as of the measurement date" and re-check against the venue's own page before relying on it.
Why a ten-cent-versus-one-cent gap is not a rounding error
At the time of measurement, BTC last traded around $80,886 on Binance's public ticker. At that price:
- A 0.01 tick is about 0.0012 basis points of the price.
- A 0.1 tick is about 0.012 basis points.
Both sound negligible next to a 10-basis-point taker fee, and for a passive one-lot order they are. The gap shows up in three practical situations:
1. Price improvement is quantized. Suppose the best ask is $80,893.6 and the market moves in your favor. On a 0.01-tick venue, the price can print $80,893.59, .58, .57 — your resting buy limit can sit one cent behind the touch and get filled at a visibly better price. On a 0.1-tick venue, those sub-ten-cent moves simply do not exist in the order book; the ladder itself refuses to represent them. Your maximum possible price-improvement edge from queuing ahead is bounded by the rung spacing.
2. Order quantities get rounded differently too. Tick size never travels alone. The same API calls show Binance allowing quantity steps of 0.00001 BTC on spot, Kraken a minimum of 0.00005 BTC, Bybit a base minimum of 0.000001 BTC with a $5 minimum order amount, and OKX's perpetual contract moving in 0.01-contract steps (its contract value is 0.01 BTC per contract). When price precision and quantity precision interact, a "small" specification difference compounds: on coarser venues, the effective granularity of notional value per order — price tick × quantity step — is often a magnitude coarser than on the fine-grained venue.
3. Backtests and bots inherit the ladder whether they like it or not. If your simulator fills orders at arbitrary prices with one-cent granularity, but the real venue quotes in tenths, your simulated fills were sometimes not representable in the real book at all. Over thousands of trades, a fraction of a basis point per fill is exactly the kind of error that turns a losing strategy green in a backtest. Before comparing maker rebates or spread-capture strategies across venues, read each tickSize/tickSz/tick_size field directly — it is free, public, and one HTTP request away.
What we deliberately did not conclude
We are not ranking venues. A 0.1 tick is not "worse" than 0.01 — coarser ladders can concentrate displayed liquidity at fewer price levels, which some market makers prefer, and tick size is one input among dozens (fees, depth, latency, insurance funds, regulation). We also did not touch how each venue computes internal engine prices, funding settlements, or liquidation triggers — those are separate mechanisms with their own documentation. The only claim in this article is the measurable one: the minimum price increment for BTC differs 10x across these four official venues, and every one of them publishes the exact number in a public, no-key API field.
That makes tick size the cheapest specification check in all of exchange comparison. No login, no KYC, no scraping of JavaScript-rendered fee tables — four curl commands, and you know how fine a ladder you are actually allowed to climb.
Verify with official sources (re-run these yourself):
- Binance:
GET https://api.binance.com/api/v3/exchangeInfo?symbol=BTCUSDT→symbols[0].filters→PRICE_FILTER.tickSize - Bybit:
GET https://api.bybit.com/v5/market/instruments-info?category=spot&symbol=BTCUSDT→result.list[0].priceFilter.tickSize - OKX:
GET https://www.okx.com/api/v5/public/instruments?instType=SWAP&instId=BTC-USDT-SWAP→data[0].tickSz - Kraken:
GET https://api.kraken.com/0/public/AssetPairs?pair=XXBTZUSD→tick_size - Field documentation: https://bybit-exchange.github.io/docs/v5/market/instrument · https://www.okx.com/docs-v5/en/
AI-assisted content disclosure: research, API pulls, and drafting were performed by an automated research system; key figures were re-verified against the endpoints listed above immediately before publication.
Not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. All figures are public specification values captured at the timestamps noted and may change at any time at each venue's discretion.
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