How our Exchange Search Engine works

Our Crypto Search Engine scans all deposit, trading and withdrawal fees of the top crypto exchanges to help you find the cheapest option to buy or exchange cryptoassets.

If you feel comfortable using search engines for flights, accommodation and other services, you will soon feel comfortable using our engine. We have designed so that it is as easy to use as possible. Just start by typing your favorite cryptoassets or fiat currencies in the search box and let the results pop!

This post provides you with some background about who are the intended users of our search engine and how the search engine works.

An engine designed for everyone interested in crypto

Our crypto Search Engine has been designed to meet the needs of miners, traders, and long term holders. Each of these groups of people need to regularly use crypto exchange services, and therefore we think they benefit from this engine as follows:

Miners

Miners get cryptoassets as income, but need to pay their electricity bills in fiat currency. Thus, they must convert their mined coins to fiat currency very regularly in order to pay their bills and secure their profits. Not doing so exposes their business to the threat of price volatility risk, which can lead to severe cash flow issues if the asset plunges.

Since miners need to exchange their mined cryptos to fiat currency very often, the fees they pay in such operations are crucial to maximize the profitability of their business.

This is not as straightforward as it may seams:

• Miner equipments usually allow mining different cryptoassets, and therefore miners regularly evaluate which coin is more profitable to mine (even on a daily basis!). Converting altcoins to fiat currency usually involves various steps and exchanges, which results in multiple combinations that would need to be analyzed.

• Mining involves randomness and therefore its income is not stable. The quantities the miner needs to convert to fiat can vary significantly, and the cheapest path to convert the crypto to fiat may vary as the amount changes.

Consequently, we expect that miners will integrate our Search Engine in their analysis tools so that:

• They can properly estimate the fees they will need to pay to convert they crypto to fiat, and chose the right coin to mine.

• They can always find the cheapest path to ensure that they optimize their profit.

Traders

Traders make money by buying or selling cryptoassets in exchanges, and therefore their profitability is highly dependant of the operating fees they pay. Optimizing exchange fees is a must for them.

When trading small quantities or in small time windows, traders usually leave their funds in exchanges and thus need to focus on optimizing trading fees. On the other hand, when trading larger quantities they generally send their funds to a wallet they control, and therefore they need to consider both trading and withdrawal fees to optimize to operation.

Hodlers

The portfolio structure of a long term holder depends on her risk appetite, but they usually have a larger portion in established cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin,...) and a smaller portion in low market cap cryptoassets that they think offer an interesting risk-reward ratio.

When investing in low market cap assets, they usually buy small amounts and store them in a wallet they control, because they plan to hodl them for a long period of time. In this scenario, optimizing withdrawal fees is critical, as they can represent a sensible amount of the investment (sometimes up to a 10%).

Our Exchange Search Engine allows hodlers to plan the whole operation to allow them to move their funds to a wallet their control paying as little fees as possible, and thus optimizing the returns when a cryptoasset skyrockets.

End-to-end calculation

Comparing crypto exchanges' trading fees is relatively easy. There are a ton of websites out there that allow you to check them at a glance. But every crypto operation involves at least a deposit (fees!), a trade (fees!) and a withdrawal (fees!).

And since not every coin is available in every exchange, some crypto operations require you to use two different exchanges. Then, expect to have two times the number of fees mentioned above (this is 6x fees).

In order to capture every fee that you might need to pay, by default we assume that you have your cryptoassets in a wallet you control and you want to perform an operation and send the cryptoasset you just bough again to a wallet you control. When operating with fiat currencies, we assume you have your funds in your bank or you want to send your funds to your bank.

This way you can calculate the operation End-2-End, and ensure you will not have any surprises in the middle of the operation (for example, when trying to withdraw your funds from the exchange).

If you currently have your funds in an exchange instead of a wallet or bank, or you want to buy a coin and leave it in a certain exchange, you are able to change the origin and destination location though the search settings and filters (see section below).

For every search result you get, you are able to expand the box and check all its detail. This way, you are able to understand how much fees you will need to pay in every step of the process, the price rates that we have used to get those numbers, and much more.

Exchanges included in the engine

We are tirelessly working to add new exchanges to our Exchange Search Engine. In order for an exchange to be integrated in the engine, we look into the following characteristics:

• Good reputation. We always want to keep our users in the safe side, and therefore we will do our best not to drive traffic to exchanges that have not proven to be trustworthy for the crypto community. Having said that, we always encourage you to do your own research before depositing any funds in an exchange.

• Liquidity. We prioritize exchanges that has the highest volume right now, as they are what our users are using the most and we want to cover all the main exchanges that you currently use.

• English language. We are currently focusing on servicing English speaking users, so we do not add to our site exchanges that do not have an English version of their platform. As we expand, we will change this policy.

Cryptoassets included in the engine

In order to give you as much value as possible, our goal is to integrate as many cryptoassets as we are able to. Therefore, we aim to add to our Search Engine every asset that is traded in the exchanges we have integrated, provided that the asset is listed in the main sites used by the crypto community (yes, you would be surprised to know that quite often we find symbols traded in exchanges that we are not able to match with any known project...).

You can currently perform searches using approximately 750 different cryptoassets (and 8 fiat currencies). Expect this number to increase gradually as we include regularly new exchanges.

Market Prices

After much tough and consideration, we decided not to use the price snapshots of every exchange, but to use the average asset price for all the exchanges.

The reason to do so is because the purpose of the Search Engine is to allow you to find the cheapest way to perform a specific operation, and using different prices for each exchange would not help you in this regard:

• You will not be able to take advantage of those temporal price differences. Prices are just snapshots of a specific moment and there might be differences between two exchanges in that exact moment. But it is highly probable that those differences will have disappeared when you get to have your funds in the exchange to perform the operation. If there is any price mismatch, arbitrage bots tend to correct it very fast. If you check in your favorite crypto price listing site (e.g. coinmarketcap), you will see that there are not remarkable differences among liquid exchanges (unless any of them has a temporal episode of FUD!).

• You will not be able to properly decide which is the best option. The exchange you select to perform an operation should be based on the fees you pay, not the current price snapshot. As stated above, when you get to have your funds in the exchange, that price difference will have changed.

Having said that, if you think you would prefer that we used different prices for each exchange, let us know and we will consider adding it as well for future releases.

Search settings and filters

Once you perform a search, you are given a set of dropdowns where you can change the search settings or filter the results. This are the options that you have currently available:

Location

By default we assume the origin or destination location of a cryptoasset is a wallet that you control. Likewise, we assume the origin or destination location of a fiat currency is a bank account. But if this is not the case and you want to change the origin or destination location of your funds, you can set it in the Location settings.

Just state which is the real origin location of your funds or the real destination of the asset you plan to buy, and we will adapt the algorithm properly.

When you change these settings a new search will be triggered to properly calculate all paths from or to the given location.

Market fee

Crypto exchanges generally have different trading fees for market makers and market takers:

• A market taker removes liquidity from the order book by placing any order that is executed against an order of the order book. If the highest selling price or the lowest buying price is okay for you and you settle a trade, you become a market taker.

• A market maker adds liquidity to the market book by placing an order with a price that is different from the current market price. Usually, a market maker will try to sell for a higher price or buy for a lower price. Market maker’s trades are not filled immediately, they appear in the order book and are executed when a market taker matches the order.

Market maker fees are usually lower because they add liquidity to the market, which is very important for exchange sites.

In order to provide a better estimate for novice users, by default our engine calculates the trading fees using the average of both market taker and market maker's fees. If you are a more experienced user, you can select the trading fees you want to apply in the calculation depending on how you actually plan to place your orders.

Connections

When buying a flight ticket you can choose to buy a direct flight from origin to destination or chose a flight with connections that might take longer but ends up being cheaper as well. Our search algorithm offers you the exact same possibility, allowing you to choose among the following options: direct exchange, paths with up to one connection and paths with up to two connections.

Below you can see what each of this options means for our Crypto Search Engine. We hope it is clear enough. If not, let us know!

• Direct exchange. Displays only results where both coins can be traded directly between them.

• One connection. To the above results, it also adds routes where you need to perform two different trades in the same exchange to complete the operation. Example: you wan to convert LTC to EOS, and since there is no LTC-EOS market in the exchange, you will need to perform two trades: LTC-BTC and then BTC-EOS.

• Two connections. To the above results, it also adds routes where you need to perform two different trades in two different exchanges to complete the operation. Example: you want to convert XVG to XLM, and you have to first convert XVG to BTC, then send those BTC to an exchange that trades XLM, and finally exchange your BTC for XLM.

Exchanges

Even though the goal of our Search Engine is to let you compare all the top crypto exchanges, we are aware that sometimes you will just want to compare a small subset of them. They might be the ones where you already have an account, the ones you personally trust the most, etc.

In order to do so, we have provided you with a filtering option that lets you select the specific exchanges you want to see in the search results.