All Price Streams Are Not the Same

The cataclysmic decline in crypto prices on October 10th brought into sharp focus something that those working in decentralised markets have always known—but sometimes try to ignore: the quality of your pricing source matters. 

Prices Across Multiple Venues 

At New Change, we have produced benchmark rates in fiat currencies for over a decade. The idea of creating streaming “benchmark” rates by collecting prices across multiple venues and aggregating them into a single feed came from experience—specifically, from measuring trading outcomes against individual venues and seeing markedly different results. 

When we turned our attention to crypto pricing, those differences became even more pronounced. The same token could trade at noticeably different prices across exchanges. The fragmented nature of fiat markets was amplified in digital assets. 

In institutional foreign exchange, prices are usually offered in significant size at the top of the book—say, USD 1 million. If you want to provide a price feed for that size, you can poll across venues and produce a rate that reflects either the best price or an average, depending on your benchmark design. 

Crypto markets, however, are far less liquid, and that liquidity is unevenly fragmented across exchanges. A simple average or best-price selection can therefore be misleading. What’s required is a price derived from multiple venues that also reflects the quality and depth of liquidity on each. That’s what we do. 

Triangulate to Get to the Truth 

A valuable lesson from fiat markets is that the best price may be found through triangulation—pricing via alternative routes. 

For example, if a trader wants to sell USD and buy NOK, the straightforward trade would be USD/NOK. But it might be more efficient to sell USD for EUR, buy NOK with EUR, and then close the EUR position—especially since EUR/USD and EUR/NOK are often more liquid than USD/NOK. 

The same principle applies to crypto markets. During the recent crash, the true pricing of some stablecoins became apparent only when triangulated through different routes. For the more liquid stablecoins, such as USDC and USDT, direct USD comparisons didn’t show much movement. But when prices were triangulated—say, via BTC or ETH—it became clear that USDC and USDT were actually appreciating relative to USD as buyers flooded the market. 

DAI measured through how many BTC or ETH it would buy compared to USD (10 October 2025) 

The lesson isn’t just to triangulate stablecoin prices to test their stability (though that’s certainly worthwhile). The lesson is broader: triangulate all tokens whenever possible to ensure you’re reflecting the most accurate, liquidity-weighted prices available. 

Triangulation has another advantage—it avoids a common mistake in crypto pricing: attempting to establish a price in a “significant amount” by digging deep into the order book. 

Order Books Are Not Real Liquidity 

Consider a hypothetical token, NEWCHANGE, trading at 1 USD to 2 NEWCHANGE. Suppose the order book shows multiple buy layers for NEWCHANGE and few sell orders, suggesting strong support and unlimited upside. 

It’s tempting to conclude that NEWCHANGE is well supported and more likely to appreciate. But holders of the token can easily create this illusion by “window dressing” and posting the buy orders below with little intention to buy and withholding their true intent to sell above. 

If negative news hits NEWCHANGE, those buy orders can be pulled instantly, and stop-losses triggered, causing the price to collapse. Conversely, in a rally, profit-taking can accelerate even as apparent support levels shift upward. The order book’s picture of liquidity is therefore often illusory—a mirage that vanishes when real trading pressure arrives. 

This was demonstrated vividly on October 10th, when buy orders evaporated en-masse as prices plunged. That’s why we construct significant-amount pricing through triangulation, not by descending into the illusory depths of the order book. 

Latency Can Be Fatal 

Another long-understood truth in fiat markets is the importance of timing or more specifically latency. The time it takes from the signal of a price change to reach you matters enormously. 

Some pricing streams mix prices taken from blockchains with top-of-book quotes from exchanges, or may also include deeper order-book level prices. It’s often unclear what such a composite price represents. 

Different blockchains operate at different speeds, and even the fastest are far from instantaneous. When news hits, top of book prices can adjust within milliseconds. A price feed that includes on-chain transaction data is, by definition, delayed—embedding latency that can make it unsuitable for trading, risk management, or even accounting. 

The value of Ethereum Ecosystem coin STETH in USD as traded on CEXs, increasing >3% within 5 seconds in a volatile market (10 October 2025) 

Our data moves when news hits because it only uses the top of book pricing. There’s a reason no one speaks of a “last-mover advantage.” You need real-time prices—rates that reflect what’s actually available now, not what was available moments ago or prices that may never see the light of day. At New Change, our mission is to produce benchmark prices that are both real and representative—derived from multiple venues, weighted for true liquidity, triangulated for accuracy, and stripped of latency. Because in volatile markets, the difference between a price and the truth can be catastrophic.