Paper trading the major coins on Trenches

This guide shows how to practice trading the biggest coins, such as Bitcoin, on Trenches. Every trade here uses paper cash at live prices, never real money. After reading it, you can place a paper buy or sale, read the 0.25% fee and what each coin cost you, and find the trade in your history.

What can you trade, and where?

The major coins are the biggest coins by market cap, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL). The letters are tickers, the short labels apps use. Market cap is a coin's price times the coins in circulation.

Easy to mix up: Spot and Perps. Spot means you buy the coin itself, outright. A perp, short for perpetual contract, is a contract with no end date that follows a coin's price, and holding it never gives you the coin. The Perps switch beside Spot opens that other page, covered in Paper trading perps: leverage, margin and funding.

If Bitcoin is new to you, start with What are crypto and Bitcoin?, the Crypto course's first lesson. The other lessons named here sit in its sections 2, 6 and 8. Those open in order as you go, or sooner if you pass a mastery test on the course map.

On a computer there are two ways in:

1. Click Trade in the sidebar, then Discover in the strip at the top, then the Blue chips tab.
2. Or press the slash key (/) to jump to the search field and type BTC. The real Bitcoin comes first. A new coin that borrows its ticker, if it shows at all, sits last with a Different token tag.

Click a coin in either list and its spot page opens.

On a phone, tap Trade, then Crypto, then Spot. You get the top 100 coins by market cap, and the note at the foot reads "0.25% paper fee on every coin here." Tap a coin to open it.

The spot page on a computer

In the header, the Price figure is the price your paper buys and sells go through at. The Spot pair figure names the pair the chart shows, such as BTC / USDT: Bitcoin priced in USDT, a stablecoin, which is a crypto asset built to track the US dollar. The lesson First asset, second asset teaches how to read a pair.

The chart draws candles: each one sums up a stretch of time as its first, highest, lowest and last price. Five timeframes set that stretch: 1m, 5m, 1h, 4h and D, for a day.

Beside the chart, or in a tab next to Chart on a smaller window, is the Order Book: the offers waiting to buy and sell. The lesson Read a bid and an ask explains its two sides. On BTC its label reads "Depth from the BTC perp": the offers come from the Bitcoin perp, not from spot, so their prices sit a little off the spot price. Your spot trades use the Price at the top.

The ticket, where you place an order, is on the right. To place a paper market order, one that goes through right away:

1. Market is the only order type. Its line reads "Fills now at the quoted price": a fill is your order going through.
2. Pick Buy or Sell.
3. Check Available to Trade: your paper cash on a buy, shown in USDC, another dollar stablecoin you do not need to buy, or your coins on a sale.
4. Enter a Size. The unit button beside it switches between the coin and USDC, and the percent slider picks a share of what you can trade. You can buy part of a coin: $100 buys a small fraction of one Bitcoin.
5. Read the lines under the button: Order Value, the order's size in dollars, then You get about, and Fees with its dollar amount.
6. Click the button, such as Buy BTC. The first click only gets it ready: it turns into Confirm: Buy BTC, with "Click again to place. Paper money only." under it.
7. Click again. A note confirms the trade, such as "Bought $100.00 of BTC".

How does a fill work on a major coin?

Every buy and every sale of a major pays a 0.25% fee. On a buy, it comes out of the dollars you spend: put in $100 and $0.25 is the fee, so $99.75 buys the coin. On a sale, it comes out of the dollars you get back.

The fee is always paid in your paper cash, never in the coin. The fee needs an asset label builds that habit: check which asset a fee is paid in.

Price impact is the move your own order causes as it uses up what is on offer. On a major there is none at paper sizes: the app treats a major as a deep market, with plenty on offer, and fills you at the quoted price.

The lesson What a market order does shows that a real market order says buy or sell and how much, but no price. The lesson The last price is history adds that the last trade's price is no promise of the price you get next.

The ticket offers Market only. Limit and stop orders, which wait for a price you set, are on the paper perps page. So are a stop loss and a take profit, which close a trade on their own at a price you pick.

Read your balances and history

Three tabs under the chart keep your record.

Balances lists the page's coin first, then USDC, then any other coins you hold. Each row shows Total Balance, Available Balance, USDC Value, Avg Entry and PNL (ROE %), your profit or loss in dollars and as a percent of cost. A Sell button on your coin's row loads a sale of the whole position into the ticket, still placed with two clicks.

Avg Entry, short for average entry, is what each coin cost you on average across your buys, fee included, so it sits about 0.25% above the price you bought at. USDC Value is your coins at the current price. So right after a buy, PNL (ROE %) shows a small loss even if the price has not moved: that is the buy fee. Selling part of the position leaves Avg Entry where it was.

Trade History lists each fill on this coin: Time, Coin, Direction, Price, Size, Trade Value, Fee and Closed PNL. On a spot row the fee sits inside Trade Value, what you spent on a buy or got back on a sale, and the Fee column stays empty. So the Price figure sits about 0.25% above the market on a buy and below it on a sale: $100.25 and $99.75 in the example below. Closed PNL shows on sales, after both fees.

Say a coin's price is $100 and you buy $1,000 of it. The fee is $2.50, so $997.50 buys 9.975 coins, and Avg Entry is about $100.25. At $100, USDC Value is $997.50, so PNL (ROE %) shows a loss of $2.50 (0.25%).

Now sell all of it at $100. You get back $995.01, so Closed PNL shows a loss of $4.99, close to 0.5% of what you paid.

Order History lists the same orders with their Order Value and a Status that reads "Filled, Market". The Paper Account card on the right totals everything in your paper account as Account value.

Buy and sell on a phone

Buy sits at the bottom of the coin screen, and Sell joins it once you hold the coin.

1. Tap Buy. Before you hold any, it reads Buy BTC.
2. Pick a chip, $10, $50, $100, $500 or Max, or tap the amount to type one.
3. Tap the green button, such as Buy $50.00 of BTC. One tap places it, with no second check.

Selling works the same, with 25%, 50%, 75% and All. Careful: the bolt beside Buy buys $100 at once, skipping these steps.

Your position then shows under the chart. Tap it for Cost basis, what you spent with the fee, and Avg. entry.

Easy to mix up: the two average entries. On a phone, Avg. entry is the coin's market cap when you bought, on average, and ends in MC. On a computer, Avg Entry is a price per coin.

Fills are also listed under History in Portfolio, the pie icon at the start of the Trade tabs. Your paper account: cash, positions and profit walks through all of it.