Spot trading

Spot trading means buying or selling a cryptocurrency for immediate delivery at the current market price, the "spot" price. If you buy 0.01 BTC on the spot market, those coins are credited to your account straight away and you own them outright; you can hold them, withdraw them to your own wallet or sell them later.

This is the simplest and most common way to trade crypto, and it is different from derivatives such as futures and options, which are contracts that track the price of an asset without you necessarily owning it. With spot trading, the most you can lose is what you put in, because there is no borrowed money involved unless you deliberately use margin.

Spot markets are organised as trading pairs, such as BTC/INR or ETH/USDT, and orders are matched on an order book. Fees are usually a small percentage of each trade, with separate maker and taker rates.