My naive understanding behind how currency trading works on Exchanges like Binance and Coinbase is each users are provided with unique address and when the respective currencies trade happens on exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, both the parties accounts get's updated live on blockchain.
To elaborate more, In case of ETH/BTC trading, let's say, Mr Foo wants to trade his ETH with Mr Bar's BTC on Binance exchange. Binance will provide both of them with unique address respectively to their currency. So when the ETH/BTC trade take place, Mr Foo will receive the BTC on his newly generated unique BTC address and Mr Foo's ETH account will be deducted . On the other side, Mr Bar's BTC account will be deducted and Ether account is updated with newly received ether.
I'm really confuse regarding whether these currency trading on exchanges execute live on Blockchain? Recently during Bitcoin and Ethereum network congestion, I did BTC/ETH trading on HITBTC, the process happened instantaneously, but I've to wait for hours during withdrawal process. Also Hitbtc seems to be using same Ethereum account (0x65e2c5175e2e618f48e70343b14c31b280e42d90) to transfer fund during withdraw request for multiple users. It seems that these exchanges are using the same address for serving multiple users.
Could somebody explain how users accounts are updated during currency trading on exchanges like Coinbase and Binance? Does trading immediately happens live on blockchain? Or Exchanges only shows the users with fake trading balances until it's withdrawn? Do the Exchanges use same address to accept deposits from multiple users?
Thank you for your time.
Check out this thread for a brief explanation of Coinbase's order management.
Answer on the reddit thread, supposedly from a coinbase insider.
In addition, my comment above was just based on intuition and my general knowledge of the way brokers work.
Brokers tend to match orders first since they are in the business of exchanging, not investing. Meaning they make their most consistent revenue from fees generated by facilitating customer orders, not by investing in the securities or assets that they help to buy/sell.
Sometimes in order to fulfill an order the broker will go long or short a particular asset class, in this case bitcoin or ethereum, etc. If this happens the broker is exposed to fluctuations in the price of that asset against the asset they are trying to grow (cash).
Now, since Coinbase is heavily involved in crypto it might be part of their strategy to hold Bitcoin or Ethereum inventory, but I would doubt it would figure much since that would undermine public trust in their institution as an impartial exchange. No one really likes to hear their broker bet against them, it tends to engender resentment.
Coinbase is setup as a software wallet, meaning you have an account, with the private keys stored on their server. So it is possible for them to facilitate some of the trading between bitcoin accounts without ever having to match orders with an account holder outside their system.
Meaning, they can collect/match/fill the orders in batches and then submit those batches to bitcoin miners. This would allow them to quickly "fulfill" your order, and then send you verification once it has been posted to the blockchain.
Although it is not specifically geared towards crypto exchanges there is an excellent book on the subject of how markets actually function.