Pull a Bitcoin price from five different exchanges at the same instant and you get five different numbers. The useful question is how different, and why. We measured it: 90 days of synchronized prices from Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Bybit, then separated the part that is real venue disagreement from the part that is just the USDT stablecoin drifting off its peg.
The short answer#
Across 90 days and the five major venues SiftingIO ingests, Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Bybit, Bitcoin's spot price agrees to a mean of 2.41 basis points (about $17 on a $70,000 BTC) once you adjust for the USDT/USD exchange rate. The spread never exceeded 10 bps in any 4-hour snapshot over the full window. The more surprising result: when you do not adjust for USDT, the apparent spread nearly triples to 6.46 bps. In other words, roughly 63% of what looks like cross-exchange price disagreement is actually the USDT stablecoin drifting off its peg, not the exchanges disagreeing.
What we measured, and how#
We pulled 4-hour closing prices for spot BTC from all five venues over 90 days (2026-03-13 to 2026-06-10, 539 synchronized snapshots on a UTC grid). Three of the venues quote BTC in USDT (Binance, OKX, Bybit); two quote in USD (Coinbase, Kraken). Comparing those directly is a methodological trap, so we fetched the contemporaneous USDT/USD rate and converted the USDT-quoted venues into USD before measuring anything.
For each snapshot we computed the cross-venue range in basis points, (max - min) / median * 10000, then aggregated across all 539 observations. Over the window, BTC traded between $60,264 and $82,505, so the period covers both calm and fast markets.
Everything here is reproducible from public exchange APIs. The method is at the end of this post.
The headline numbers#
Two views of the same 90 days. "Raw" compares venues as quoted, with USDT prices sitting next to USD prices. "USDT-adjusted" converts the USDT venues to USD first, which is the spread that actually reflects venue disagreement.
Cross-venue spread Raw (USDT+USD) USDT-adjusted
--------------------------- -------------- -------------
Mean 6.46 bps 2.41 bps
Median 4.92 bps 2.27 bps
95th percentile 16.24 bps 4.49 bps
99th percentile 19.25 bps 5.85 bps
Worst 4h snapshot (90 days) 22.2 bps 7.08 bps
Share of time above 10 bps 21.7% 0.0%
The single most useful takeaway for anyone pricing crypto: about 63% of naive cross-exchange dispersion is USDT basis, not the exchange. If you build a fair BTC price by averaging USDT and USD venues without normalizing the quote currency, you are baking the stablecoin's drift straight into your price.
USDT itself was well-behaved but not flat over the window. It averaged $0.99961 and ranged from $0.9982 to $1.00041, sitting more than 10 bps off peg 16.9% of the time. That small, persistent wobble is exactly what leaks into a naive multi-venue average.
Which venue is "high"?#
After USDT adjustment, no venue is meaningfully mispriced, but they are not identical either. Below is each venue's average absolute deviation from the cross-venue median, and its signed bias, where positive means it tends to trade rich.
Venue Quote Avg abs deviation Signed bias
-------- ----- ----------------- -----------
Binance USDT 0.37 bps -0.06 bps
Bybit USDT 0.37 bps -0.03 bps
OKX USDT 0.42 bps -0.02 bps
Coinbase USD 0.94 bps +0.30 bps
Kraken USD 1.23 bps +0.15 bps
The three USDT majors are pinned to within about 0.4 bps of each other. For pricing purposes they behave like one shared order book. The two USD venues are looser: Coinbase consistently trades slightly rich (+0.30 bps on average), and Kraken is the most variable of the five. None of this is arbitrage you could trade after fees. It is the residual texture of five independent venues.
Does dispersion widen when the market moves fast?#
Barely. The correlation between 4-hour absolute returns (our volatility proxy) and cross-venue spread was just 0.106, weakly positive. Bitcoin is arbitraged tightly enough that even sharp moves do not pull the major venues far apart at 4-hour resolution. The widest snapshot in the entire 90 days was 7.08 bps on 2026-04-14, when Coinbase printed $74,299.83 against OKX at $74,247.23, a $52.60 gap on a roughly $74,300 coin.
Why this matters if you consume a price#
A single, trustworthy BTC price is harder than averaging a few exchanges, for two reasons this study makes concrete:
- Quote currency dominates the error budget. Most of the cross-venue spread you will see in the wild is USDT, not the exchange. Normalize the stablecoin first or your fair price inherits its drift.
- A plain average is fragile. If one venue lags or prints a bad tick, an arithmetic mean moves with it. Using a median, or a volume-weighted and outlier-resistant median, keeps the published price anchored to where the venues actually agree, which, as we have shown, is a very tight 2 to 3 bps most of the time.
This is how SiftingIO's aggregation works in practice: convert every venue to a common quote currency, then combine them with a volume-weighted, outlier-resistant median rather than a simple average. The full endpoint reference is in the docs.
Limits of this study#
To keep the numbers honest:
- Sampling is 4-hour closes, not tick data. Instantaneous dispersion during a fast move can briefly exceed what 4-hour snapshots capture. This measures structural disagreement, not microsecond spikes.
- Spot only, USD and USDT pairs, close to close. Perpetuals, other quote currencies, and intra-bar highs and lows are out of scope.
- Five venues. Smaller or regional exchanges disperse more than these liquidity leaders. This is a best-case, major-venue picture.
FAQ#
How much do Bitcoin prices differ between exchanges?#
Across Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Bybit over 90 days, the average difference between the highest and lowest venue was 2.41 basis points (about $17 on a $70,000 BTC) after adjusting for the USDT/USD rate, and it never exceeded 10 bps in any 4-hour snapshot. Without that adjustment the average looks like 6.46 bps.
Why do Bitcoin prices look different on different exchanges?#
Most of the apparent gap is the quote currency, not the exchange. Three of the five venues price BTC in USDT and two price in USD. Because USDT drifts a little off its $1 peg, comparing USDT prices to USD prices directly overstates the spread. In our data about 63% of the naive dispersion was USDT basis. The rest is normal venue-level supply and demand.
Which exchange has the highest Bitcoin price?#
On average over the 90 days, Coinbase traded slightly rich, about +0.30 bps above the cross-venue median, while the USDT venues (Binance, OKX, Bybit) stayed within about 0.4 bps of the median. The differences are far too small to arbitrage after fees.
Does Bitcoin price dispersion increase during volatility?#
Only weakly. We found a correlation of 0.106 between 4-hour volatility and cross-venue spread. The major venues stay tightly aligned even in fast markets at this sampling resolution.
How can I get a single normalized Bitcoin price across exchanges?#
Use a service that converts every venue to one quote currency and aggregates with an outlier-resistant median instead of a plain average. SiftingIO publishes exactly that across CEX and DEX venues over REST and WebSocket. See the docs for the endpoints, or create an account to try it.
Reproduce it yourself#
The study uses only public, unauthenticated endpoints:
- Binance
api/v3/klines(BTCUSDT, 4h) - Coinbase
products/BTC-USD/candles(1h, resampled to 4h) - Kraken
0/public/OHLC(XBTUSD, interval 240) - OKX
api/v5/market/history-candles(BTC-USDT, 4H) - Bybit
v5/market/kline(BTCUSDT spot, 240) - USDT/USD from Coinbase
USDT-USDand KrakenUSDTUSD, blended
Align all six series to a 4-hour UTC grid, multiply each USDT venue's close by the contemporaneous USDT/USD rate, then compute the per-snapshot range in basis points and aggregate. Same inputs, same window, same numbers.