Liquidity
How easily an asset can be traded in size, quickly, without moving its price much.
Liquidity has three practical dimensions: how tight the spread is, how much size sits near the quote, and how quickly depth returns after a large trade. It is supplied by market makers quoting on order books and by depositors funding automated market maker pools, and it is conditional rather than permanent, thinning during volatility, holidays, and exchange outages. Liquidity should not be inferred from market capitalization: a large capitalization only multiplies a price by a supply figure and says nothing about how much can actually be traded at that price. Analysts measure it with spread, depth at a fixed distance from the mid, and the ratio of volume to capitalization.
En pratique
An asset can show a high market capitalization while only a small fraction of its supply is ever available to trade, so a modest order still moves the price.
Le malentendu courant
Trading volume is not liquidity; volume inflated by wash trading or fee incentives can be high on a venue where a normal order still moves the price sharply.
Le chiffre auquel cela correspond
Total dollar value of trades in the asset across covered venues during the last 24 hours.
Limites: Exchange-reported volume has a long documented history of inflation through wash trading and zero-fee or rebate-funded incentive programs, and providers apply their own opaque filters to decide which venues to trust. Coverage differs fundamentally between sources: some include perpetual futures and…