Order types on crypto venues

Definition

Crypto venues run central limit-order books with an order-type vocabulary borrowed from equities — market, limit, stop — plus venue-native variants (post-only, reduce-only, time-in-force flags) whose exact semantics are VENUE-DEFINED, not standardized by any regulator or exchange consortium. The equity baseline (ms-order-types) transfers as vocabulary but not as guarantee: there is no inter-venue best-execution obligation, no order protection rule, and stop behavior differs venue to venue in ways that matter at exactly the moments stops matter.

How it works / structure

• Core book orders: limit (with GTC/IOC/FOK time-in-force) and market orders behave as in any CLOB; market orders on thin books walk depth with no NBBO cap (crypto-fees-spreads).
• Post-only: rejects or reprices the order if it would cross the spread — a maker-fee guarantee flag, ubiquitous because maker/taker fee gaps are wide on crypto venues.
• Stops: implemented venue-side as conditional orders whose TRIGGER SOURCE varies — last trade, an internal mark price, or an index price. Derivatives venues typically trigger protective stops on mark/index rather than last trade to resist thin-print manipulation (crypto-perpetual-futures carries the mark-price machinery); spot venues commonly trigger on last trade. The trigger source is a contract term to verify, not assume.
• Reduce-only (derivatives venues): the order may only shrink a position — the flag that prevents a closing order from flipping direction when size races the fill.
• No consolidated routing: an order lives on one venue’s book; “smart routing” exists only as self-built or third-party execution tooling (ms-execution-algos concepts apply, self- supplied).

When it applies

Execution design on any crypto venue: which order types exist, what triggers stops, whether post-only is available, and what the venue does in an outage (working orders may or may not be cancelable exactly when it matters). Strategy specifications and replays must pin these semantics per venue — a strategy tested with last-trade stops behaves differently under mark-price triggering.

Risk profile & failure modes

• Stop-trigger mismatch: a last-trade-triggered stop can fire on a single anomalous print in a thin book; a mark-triggered stop can decline to fire while the tradeable price runs through the level. Both are documented venue behaviors; the CFTC advisory flags volatility and platform-outage risk generally.
• Market orders in thin depth: without an NBBO backstop, slippage on market orders is bounded only by the book (ms-slippage-friction).
• Outage-window exposure: venue outages during fast markets have repeatedly left working orders unmanageable — the equity assumption “I can always cancel” does not carry a guarantee.
• Semantics drift: venues change order-type behavior by policy update; a strategy’s execution assumptions are dated claims needing re-verification (disc-pre-trade-checklist).

Evidence & limits

Order-type mechanics are venue-documented terms of service and API documentation — authoritative for each venue, heterogeneous across venues; this entry states the cross-venue pattern and deliberately avoids naming any venue’s current semantics, which drift. The equity definitions baseline is SEC investor-education material. No execution-quality statistics are claimed — measure per venue (ms-market-impact).

Falsifiable-thesis examples

Illustrations only, not signals:

• “Replaying the strategy with mark-price stop triggers instead of last-trade triggers changes annual return by more than 200 bps (trigger-sensitivity thesis)” — falsified by the paired replay.
• “Post-only limit entries achieve maker fees on over 90% of fills without materially degrading fill rate this quarter (execution-cost thesis)” — falsified by the fill log.

Cross-references

• Equity baseline: ms-order-types; execution tooling concepts: ms-execution-algos
• The books these orders rest on: crypto-spot-market-structure; the costs around them: crypto-fees-spreads, ms-slippage-friction
• Mark-price and liquidation machinery: crypto-perpetual-futures