Market depth is an interesting concept to understand, especially for those who are into cryptocurrency trading.
In essence, it’s a way to gauge how liquid a certain cryptocurrency is and if its order book is healthy and can consume a certain number of orders.
That said, Ripple’s XRP is one of the most traded altcoins on the market, and it boasts a massive daily volume across most of the major cryptocurrency exchanges. Therefore, it’s interesting to take a look at how much money is needed to move its price.
Starting with Binance – the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange – to move the price of XRP by 2% in a positive direction, you need to execute a market order of $1.9 million. On the other hand, if you want to bring it down by the same amount, you have to sell $3.3 million worth of XRP at the time of this writing.
The second-largest exchange in this regard is Coinbase, where you need $650K to increase XRP’s price by 2% and just shy of $1 million to decrease it.
The fact that there’s a larger depth on the negative side shows that there are more orders placed to accumulate XRP at a difference of 2% below the current price. On the other hand – there are fewer sellers willing to dispose of XRP at a difference of 2% above the current price.
On a foreign market like the KRW, the most liquid exchange with the thickest market depth is Bithumb – the Korean platform. There, you only need $390,000 to increase XRP’s price by 2% and about $500K to decrease it. This goes to show that on both exchanges, the sell-side market depth is more considerable and it is indicative that there are more orders ready to absorb significant selling pressure.
