Crypto Listing Glossary

Concise definitions of the trading and infrastructure terms used across CryptoListing.ws. Most entries link out to the relevant landing page or doc section for deeper context.

spot listing

An exchange announcement that a token is now available for spot trading on a specific market (e.g., USDT, KRW). Spot listings are typically the most price-impactful event class on a given token.

futures listing

An exchange announcement that a token is now available as a futures or perpetual contract. Often listed alongside or shortly after the spot listing on the same exchange.

delisting

An exchange announcement that a token will be removed from spot or futures trading on a future date. The market typically reprices the token sharply downward within minutes of the notice.

HODLer airdrop

A Binance program that distributes free token allocations to wallets holding BNB through Simple Earn during a snapshot window. The airdrop announcement frequently precedes the spot listing of the same token.

Kimchi premium

The price gap (often 5-30%) between Korean exchanges (Upbit, Bithumb) and global venues (Binance, OKX), driven by capital controls and concentrated retail demand. Common after a fresh Korean listing.

WebSocket

A persistent, full-duplex TCP-based protocol (RFC 6455) that lets a server push messages to a client without polling. CryptoListing.ws delivers every announcement over a single long-lived WebSocket per subscriber.

X-API-Key

An HTTP header used to authenticate to the WebSocket upgrade request. Each subscriber has a unique key, scoped to a single tier (Free, Basic, or Premium) and tracked independently per endpoint.

detection-to-dispatch latency

The wall-clock time between the moment our watcher detects an exchange announcement and the moment our central server hands the structured event off to your TCP connection. Captured per-event in microsecond precision.

end-to-end latency

The wall-clock time between the moment an exchange publishes an announcement and the moment your bot's user-space code receives the structured event. Always larger than detection-to-dispatch because it includes detection, parsing, dispatch, and network transit to your bot.

p50 / p99 latency

Percentile latency metrics. p50 is the median (half of events were faster, half slower); p99 is the latency below which 99% of events fall. p99 captures tail behavior that p50 hides.

jitter

The variation in event-to-event latency over a window. A feed with low average latency but high jitter is harder to trade than one with slightly higher but more consistent latency, because trading pipelines budget for the worst case.

matching engine

The exchange component that pairs buy and sell orders against the order book. Co-locating your bot in the same AWS region as the matching engine eliminates inter-region network hops and is the foundation of any low-latency trading architecture.

colocation

Running your server in the same data center (or AWS region/availability zone) as a service you communicate with, to minimize network round-trip time. Binance's matching engine is colocated in AWS Tokyo (ap-northeast-1).

network hop

A leg of internet routing between two points (e.g., Seoul to Tokyo). Each hop adds round-trip latency. For Korean exchange announcements, removing the Seoul-to-Tokyo detection hop is the main reason our Seoul endpoint exists.

RTT (round-trip time)

Round-trip time. The time for a network packet to travel from sender to receiver and back. Tokyo-Seoul RTT is roughly 30 ms; Tokyo-US East RTT is roughly 150-180 ms; Tokyo-EU RTT is roughly 220-260 ms.

watcher

A region-local component that subscribes to (or polls) a specific exchange's announcement endpoint, parses the title, extracts the ticker, and forwards a structured event to the central broadcaster. Each exchange has its own watcher.

announcement

An official notice from a centralized exchange that materially affects a token's tradeable status. CryptoListing.ws covers spot listings, futures listings, delistings, HODLer airdrops, and maintenance notices.

ticker

The short symbol used to identify a token (e.g., BTC, ETH, ROBO). On a listing announcement, the ticker is what the bot uses to look up the token on faster venues and place an order.

snipe bot

A trading bot designed to enter a position the instant a listing event is detected, before the broader market reacts. Snipe bots are the primary use case for ultra-low-latency listing feeds.

KRW market

A trading pair quoted in Korean won (KRW) on a Korean exchange. Upbit and Bithumb's KRW markets are the dominant retail venues in Korea and frequently produce the largest listing pumps thanks to the Kimchi premium.

REST polling

A pattern where a client repeatedly issues HTTP requests to check for new data. Always slower than a server-pushed WebSocket because the client only learns about an event on the next poll cycle.

AWS region

An isolated geographic AWS deployment (e.g., ap-northeast-1 = Tokyo, ap-northeast-2 = Seoul). Each region has multiple data centers (availability zones). Cross-region traffic always crosses the public internet (or AWS Global Accelerator) and adds latency.

availability zone

A discrete data center inside an AWS region (e.g., ap-northeast-2c). Within a region, AZ-to-AZ latency is extremely low, so co-locating in the same region is what matters; specific AZ usually doesn't.

microsecond timestamp

A timestamp with microsecond resolution (1/1,000,000 of a second), captured directly from the system clock. CryptoListing.ws includes detectedTimestampUs and dispatchTimestampUs fields on every event so subscribers can verify dispatch timing themselves.

perpetual contract

A perpetual swap contract: a futures-like instrument with no expiry, kept aligned with spot via a periodic funding rate. Binance's USDT-margined perps are the most liquid crypto derivatives venue.