Crypto vs forex basics
Ce guide est pour l’instant disponible en anglais. Les traductions suivront.
Crypto and foreign exchange (forex, or FX) are both quoted around the clock for much of the week, both attract short-term traders, and both are often offered with leverage. They are not the same market. This guide compares the plumbing: hours, venues, price formation, costs, and the kinds of news that typically move each one. It is a map, not a recommendation to trade either, and not financial advice.
What each market is
FX is the market for exchanging national currencies — euros for dollars, dollars for yen, and so on. The most liquid pairs involve the US dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound, the Swiss franc, and a handful of others. Trading is decentralized: banks, electronic communication networks, and retail brokers. There is no single “the exchange” for EUR/USD. Prices you see on a retail platform are that provider’s quote, usually tightly connected to the wider market in the majors, and sometimes less so in exotic pairs.
Crypto is the market for digital assets such as bitcoin and ether, plus a long tail of other tokens. Trading happens on many centralized exchanges, on decentralized venues, and in over-the-counter deals. There is no single official price. A coin can trade at slightly (or, in stress, very) different prices on two venues. Perpetual swaps and dated futures add another set of prices, tethered to spot by funding and by arbitrage when it is possible to arbitrage.
Hours and sessions
FX has a strong session structure even though the majors trade from Monday morning in Asia through Friday afternoon in New York: Tokyo, London, and New York each bring their own liquidity and typical volatility. Weekends are largely closed. Gaps can appear around the Friday close and the Sunday open.
Crypto trades all weekend. Liquidity still breathes — some hours are much thinner than others — but there is no regular weekly close in the same sense. That is one reason weekend liquidation wicks show up in crypto more than in EUR/USD. It is also why “the New York close” on a bitcoin chart is a convention, not a venue halt.
Volatility, leverage, and structure
Major FX pairs often move in relatively small percentages on a quiet day, then more around data or central-bank events. Crypto, especially outside bitcoin and ether, can move several percent without a scheduled event. That is not a virtue or a vice; it is a risk input. Position size that feels conservative in EUR/USD can be aggressive in a mid-cap token.
Retail FX brokers have often offered high leverage, sometimes now capped by regional rules. Crypto venues also offer high leverage on derivatives, with liquidation engines that are a core part of the design (see those guides). Margin rules, negative-balance policies, and Saturday-night liquidity are not interchangeable between a regulated FX broker and a crypto exchange. Read the actual rulebook.
Costs and execution
FX majors usually have very tight spreads during London/New York overlap. Costs are spread, commission if any, and occasional financing on overnight positions (tom/next). Crypto costs are exchange fees, spreads that can widen sharply, funding on perpetuals, and withdrawal or on-chain fees if you move coins. A “zero fee” banner almost always hides a spread or another charge.
Execution quality in FX depends on the broker’s model (dealing desk or not, last-look, and so on). In crypto it depends on the venue’s book, your order type, and sometimes on congestion or an API issue. Slippage is real in both.
News and calendars
FX is tightly tied to macroeconomic releases: inflation, employment, central-bank decisions, and fiscal news. The economic calendar is a standard tool (see that guide). Crypto reacts to those same dollar and rate stories and to its own catalogue: exchange incidents, regulation, large on-chain movements, ETF flow headlines, and liquidations. A quiet FX calendar day is not automatically a quiet crypto day.
A note on “transferring a strategy”
A scalping or breakout method that seemed tolerable in a major FX pair can behave badly on a thin altcoin: wider spreads, worse wicks, different session patterns, and a liquidation engine that FX spot accounts may not have in the same form. If you study both, study them as different instruments that happen to share a 24-hour clock for part of the week — not as skins of the same video game.
This article is for information only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Both FX and crypto trading can result in the loss of capital, especially when leverage is used.
Settlement and custody
FX retail accounts usually settle as a balance with a broker, not as a stack of physical banknotes. You are exposed to that broker’s health and to the rules of its regulator, if it has one. Crypto can be held on an exchange (counterparty risk, like a venue balance) or in a wallet you control (operational risk: keys, phishing, irreversible transfers). Derivatives on a crypto venue add liquidation-engine risk on top. “Not your keys” and “not your broker” are different slogans for related questions: who holds the assets, who can freeze them, and what happens in a failure. Those answers are part of the market’s structure, even if you only ever look at a price chart.