The price you see on Coin Bank and the amount a platform actually charges you when buying are almost never identical, and there’s a clear reason for every difference.
A reference price, not a trading quote
The crypto prices on this site come from CoinGecko, which calculates them as a weighted average across many trading platforms worldwide. It’s a reference price, useful as a benchmark, but not something you automatically “get” anywhere: every platform has its own order book, with its own buyers and sellers, and its actual price at any given moment can sit a bit above or below the global average.
Why it varies from platform to platform
The difference between a platform’s buy price and sell price is called the spread, and it exists separately from any explicit fee. A platform with fewer users or less liquidity tends to have a wider spread, because it needs a bigger margin to cover its risk. On top of that come the actual fees, both platform and network, which differ from one provider to another. We go into detail in the fees guide.
The leu doesn’t have just one rate
The same logic applies to the MDL side. The conversion to MDL on this site uses the official rate published by the National Bank of Moldova for the current day, which is also a reference price, calculated by the BNM based on the interbank currency market. A bank or a currency exchange house in Moldova can post its own buy rate and sell rate, both different from the official rate, for the same reason a crypto platform has its own price: every institution sets its own margin.
Market cap isn’t the unit price
The prices page also shows market-cap figures, not just the price of one unit. Market cap is calculated by multiplying the current price by the number of units in circulation, so an asset with a low unit price can have a large market cap if there are enough units, and the reverse is also true. The two numbers answer different questions: the price says what one unit costs right now, market cap says what the entire circulating supply is theoretically worth.
What to remember
- The price shown here is a reference price (a global average), not a quote a specific platform will match exactly.
- The differences come from spread, fees, and liquidity, which vary from platform to platform, the same way they do at a currency exchange house.
- The MDL rate used is the official BNM one; a bank or exchange house can have its own buy and sell rates.