FeeFloor Research

Which crypto exchange is actually the cheapest?

By the FeeFloor Data Team·Continuously measured since 15 July 2026·1 sweep so far·Updated 15 Jul 2026, 11:37 UTC

Latest sweep

15 Jul 2026, 11:37 UTC

History

Since 15 July 2026 · 1 sweep

30-day window

Building · 1%

The short answers

The cheapest venue for the trade most people actually make, by the dimensions that move it.

The scenario matrix

This is the authoritative result: the cheapest venue for every asset × market × order-size combination we measure, by all-in cost. Each cell is the most recent measurement; a “depth-limited” note counts venues whose order book could not fill that size within tolerance and were excluded from the ranking.

Asset · market	$1K	$10K	$100K	$1M
BTCSpot	Deribit$0.424.15 bps	MEXC$5.005.00 bps	MEXC$50.005.00 bps	MEXC$618.006.18 bps3 depth-limited
BTCPerpetual	Lighter$0.030.27 bps	Lighter$0.500.50 bps	Lighter$8.500.85 bps1 depth-limited	Lighter$78.000.78 bps6 depth-limited
ETHSpot	Deribit$0.292.93 bps	MEXC$5.035.03 bps	MEXC$50.305.03 bps	Toobit$1.1K11.11 bps6 depth-limited
ETHPerpetual	Lighter$0.020.24 bps	Lighter$0.990.99 bps	Lighter$12.501.25 bps1 depth-limited	MEXC$203.002.03 bps8 depth-limited
SOLSpot	MEXC$0.575.65 bps	MEXC$5.655.65 bps	MEXC$61.906.19 bps1 depth-limited	MEXC$1.6K15.56 bps6 depth-limited
SOLPerpetual	Lighter$0.060.56 bps	Lighter$1.631.63 bps	Lighter$17.901.79 bps2 depth-limited	MEXC$392.003.92 bps13 depth-limited

How the cheapest venue changes as a BTC trade grows from $1K to $1M

Follow one asset and market — a BTC perpetual taker order — across four sizes. At the bottom of the range the trading fee dominates, so the venue with the lowest fee wins. As the order grows, the spread you cross and the slippage your size pushes through the book matter more than the fee, and the ranking shifts. By $1M, some venues cannot fill the order at all and drop out entirely — the line simply stops.

Fee vs. spread vs. slippage: what moves the ranking

Three costs make up every all-in number, and they scale differently. The fee is a flat percentage — identical at $1K and $1M, so it dominates only when the others are small. The spreadyou cross is roughly fixed in basis points but reads larger on lower-priced assets, which is why SOL’s spread looks higher than BTC’s even in a tight market. Slippage is the one that grows with size: a small order barely moves the book, a large one walks through several levels. The cross-over between fee-dominated and slippage-dominated is exactly where the cheapest venue changes hands.

Spot and perpetuals are different races

We never blend the two, because they are won by different venues. Perpetual futures are dominated by low-fee perp DEXs and derivatives specialists; spot is a separate contest among the large centralized exchanges. A venue that is cheapest for spot BTC can be mid-pack for the perpetual, and vice versa — reading a single “cheapest exchange” across both is how most comparisons mislead.

Zero trading fees don’t mean zero trading cost

The headline fee is the most-advertised and least-complete number in crypto. In the latest completed sweep, the venue with the lowest advertised fee also delivered the lowest all-in cost in only 19 of 24 scenarios with enough venues to compare. In the other 5, a venue charging a higher fee was actually cheaper once spread and slippage were counted — the gap the fee page never shows you.

The $1M question: who has real liquidity

At size, depth decides. Below is how many venues per market could not fill a $1M order within tolerance in the most recent sweep — the ones that look competitive on a fee page but run out of book when the order is real.

This section is the seed of a companion study, The $1 Million Crypto Trade: Which Exchanges Have Real Liquidity?, which will go deeper on order-book depth alone.

Methodology, limitations and data

Every number is all-in cost — fee + spread + slippage — measured from live order books, exactly as described on our methodology page. The study uses standard list prices (taker, standard tier, no referral discount) so anyone can reproduce it; referral discounts are a separate lever, not baked into these results. We re-measure all 24 scenarios every few hours and report the winner per cell plus a scenario win rate over the whole window — we deliberately do notcollapse the scenarios into one average “overall winner”, because that number would depend entirely on how you weight assets, markets and sizes. The best measured order-book depth answer excludes oracle-priced venues (GMX, Jupiter, Gains and similar), which fill any size from an external price and so have no order book to measure.

Limitations. These are estimates of immediate execution cost at measurement time; real fills move with the book. The window so far is 1 sweep — the longer it runs, the more robust the win rates. Funding, withdrawal and regional pricing differences are out of scope.