Money, markets & the crypto asset class

Strip away the charts and jargon and a market does exactly one thing: it matches buyers with sellers and publishes the price they agreed on. Every candlestick you will ever study is just a compressed record of those agreements.

Crypto markets do this 24/7, globally, with no closing bell. That is their defining feature — and their defining risk. There is no overnight pause to think, and no circuit breaker waiting to save you.

Two roles keep any market alive. Makers post standing offers to buy or sell at a stated price — they provide liquidity and wait. Takers accept those offers — they consume liquidity and get immediacy. Every trade has exactly one of each, and exchanges price their fees around this distinction.

Price is set at the margin. It doesn't matter what a million holders think BTC is worth — it matters what the next willing buyer and next willing seller agree on. One motivated seller into a thin book moves price more than a thousand contented holders holding still.

This is why prices gap violently on news: the marginal participants reprice instantly while everyone else watches. And it's why market cap is not money in: a $1B market cap does not mean $1B was ever invested — it means the *last* trade times the supply.

"Crypto" is not one asset class — it is at least five, with different holders, liquidity, and failure modes. Treating a memecoin like BTC (or vice versa) is a category error that costs real money.

Stablecoins are the fifth class: tokens engineered to hold $1. They are your cash leg, your unit of account, and where you park between trades — but they carry their own issuer and depeg risks, covered in the DeFi module.