How material are crypto-asset trading frictions? In their June 2026 paper entitled "The 'Actual Retail Price' of Crypto Trades", Dominik Rösch, Thomas Shohfi, Jenny Stanco and Michael Walz execute several hundred real crypto-asset trades to evaluate trading frictions (fees plus bid-ask spreads) on three major crypto-asset exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken and Crypto.com) and Robinhood. They note that:
- There is no National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) mechanism across crypto-asset exchanges. Each maintains its own order book.
- There is no unified best execution mandate for retail spot crypto-asset trades.
- Many retail crypto-asset platforms embed bid-ask spreads into displayed prices rather than explicitly breaking them out.
- Crypto-asset order routing decisions are not subject to the disclosure requirements of equities markets.
They assess trading frictions in two ways other than matched Robinhood trades: (a) estimates reported by Kaiko at the same time and on the same exchange; and, (b) frictions for relevant crypto-asset-tracking exchange-traded funds (ETF) at the same time from the Trade and Quote (TAQ) database. They further construct synthetic cross-exchange Best Bid and Offer midpoint from quotes across the three exchanges (3BBO). Using data from 496 trades (256 buys and 240 sells) randomly ranging from $100 to $400 for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Dogecoin during April 17, 2025 through September 4, 2025, they find that:
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