Spot Market
A market where assets are bought and sold for immediate delivery at the current market price.
The spot market is where assets trade for immediate (or near-immediate) settlement at the prevailing 'spot price'. When you buy Bitcoin on Coinbase or swap ETH for USDC on Uniswap, you are transacting in the spot market. Settlement on-chain is essentially instantaneous; on CEXs it is typically T+0 within the platform's internal ledger.
Spot markets contrast with derivatives markets (futures, options, perpetuals) where contracts reference a future price or are settled at a later date. The spot price is the reference price that derivatives markets must converge toward — via mechanisms like the funding rate in perpetuals or expiry settlement in futures.
Spot markets provide 'true' price discovery and are the ultimate anchor for derivative pricing. Large divergences between spot price and perpetual price create arbitrage opportunities. On-chain spot DEX prices (Uniswap, Curve) are also used as oracle inputs for DeFi protocols, making spot market manipulation a key attack vector.