The anatomy of real crypto trading costs.

The most visible — and usually smallest — part. Entry-tier taker rates without volume discounts (as of 2026-06-10, each from the venue’s own fee page): Binance 0.10%, MEXC 0.05% (maker currently 0% as a promotion), OKX 0.10%, Kraken 0.40%, Crypto.com 0.50%, Coinbase 1.20% in the entry tier.

And Bitpanda charges 0% fee — while, per its own published schedule, a premium of 0.99% (BTC) or 1.49% (major altcoins) is already built into the offered prices. The lesson: where the fee disappears, it moves into the price.

Most comparisons quote the midpoint between best bid and best ask — a price nobody can trade at, for a size nobody named. We do it differently: we take your concrete order size and consume the venue’s live orderbook level by level, the way a real market order fills. The volume-weighted average of those partial fills is your effective price; the gap to the reference price is the spread — the part no fee table mentions, and it grows with order size.

How much it matters is measurable. In the June 2026 True-Cost Index (12,380 measurements across 8 assets), MEXC — advertising a near-zero fee — averaged €2.67 all-in per €1,000 trade, €2.17 of it hidden spread. Binance averaged €1.39 all-in and was the cheapest venue in 85.9% of measured rounds; Coinbase averaged €12.56 and was the most expensive in 75.0%. Monthly numbers: the True-Cost Index.

On-chain, every movement costs a network fee. On the DEX route, the comparison prices gas directly into the result: it simply reduces the coins that arrive. The estimate comes from the route itself, with a current network estimate as fallback — and when neither source answers, we label the result “excl. gas” instead of guessing.

Between the cheapest and the most expensive published fee lay more than a factor of 60 at the verification date. How much that reshuffles a ranking showed in our June 2026 live measurement: MEXC — with a 0% maker promotion and 0.05% taker the lowest advertised fee among the orderbook venues in the comparison — fell to rank 9 of eleven once the BTC withdrawal (around €10.72 at that moment) was included.

Two honesty footnotes belong here. First, most venues adjust these fees dynamically with network congestion — our values are the published schedule figures on the verification date, not promises. Second, during verification we found circulating “guide” values that were off by a factor of 3 to 13; we only carry what the venue itself publishes — and where it publishes nothing, that is exactly what the page says.

The convenient “Convert” or “Instant Buy” button carries a markup the spot orderbook does not. Our comparison prices spot — so we display this markup separately wherever a citable figure exists (as of 2026-06-10):

Coinbase, curated range 0.5–2%: Coinbase’s own help pages acknowledge a spread on simple buys and converts; a fee teardown puts it at around 0.5%, up to about 2% in volatile phases, and a 2025 US lawsuit alleges roughly 1% on buys and 2% on converts. Kraken, curated range 1.5–2.4%: an industry fee comparison cites roughly 1.5% spread plus a 0.9% processing fee for Instant Buy.

Both are editorially verified, typical ranges — not live measurements — and they never enter the ranking. Bitpanda deliberately has no such row: it has no separate spot orderbook; its published premium is exactly what the comparison already prices.

The live comparison adds fee, measured spread, network and — switchable — the withdrawal into a single quantity: what actually arrives, net, with you, at your order size, right now. The ranking uses only that quantity — never affiliate payout.