Trading pair

A trading pair shows which two assets are being exchanged in a market and how one is priced in terms of the other. In BTC/INR, bitcoin is the base asset and the rupee is the quote asset, so a price of 75,00,000 means one bitcoin costs ₹75 lakh. In ETH/BTC, ether is priced in bitcoin.

Exchanges list many pairs. Fiat pairs such as BTC/INR let you trade directly with rupees. Stablecoin pairs such as SOL/USDT are often the most liquid, because global trading is concentrated in dollar stablecoins. Crypto-to-crypto pairs, such as ETH/BTC, let you swap one coin for another without going through fiat.

Liquidity can differ widely between pairs of the same coin, so the same token may have a tighter spread and less slippage on its USDT pair than its INR pair. Converting between pairs usually costs a fee on each leg of the trade, so a direct pair is often cheaper than two separate trades.