Spot Market
The market where an asset is traded for immediate delivery and payment, rather than as a contract to be settled later.
On a centralized exchange, immediate delivery means an instant update to the exchange's internal ledger; the assets move on a blockchain only when a customer withdraws. On a decentralized exchange, delivery is genuinely on chain and both legs settle in the same transaction or neither does. Spot prices from a set of large venues are combined into the index prices that derivatives contracts settle against, which is why spot liquidity matters even to traders who only use derivatives. Compared with equities, where settlement follows a business-day cycle, digital-asset spot settlement is effectively continuous.
In practice
A derivatives venue calculates its mark price from an index of several spot venues rather than from its own last traded price.
The common misunderstanding
Immediate delivery on a centralized venue means an internal ledger update, not a blockchain transfer to the customer.
The figure this maps to
Total dollar value of trades in the asset across covered venues during the last 24 hours.
Limits: 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…