Maker and Taker
Maker order · Taker order · Liquidity provider and liquidity taker · Maker-taker fees
A maker's order rests on the order book and waits to be filled; a taker's order fills at once against an order already resting there.
Simple explanation
Background: Korean exchanges use the English words as they are (메이커, 테이커). For Korean traders the split matters for fees, for the "post only" option, and for reading buying and selling pressure in trade data, where Korean screens show buys in red and sells in blue.
Every trade is two orders meeting. One was already resting on the order book; the other arrived and took it. The resting order is the maker (it "made" the market) and the incoming one is the taker. So every fill has exactly one maker side and one taker side. Makers add depth to the book and are sometimes called liquidity providers; takers remove it and are liquidity takers.
Order types map onto this, but not exactly. A market order always takes. A limit order depends on its price: if the lowest ask is ₩1,001 and you bid ₩1,000, your order rests on the book and is a maker; bid ₩1,001 or more and it fills on the spot as a taker. If part of an order fills at once and the rest stays on the book, the part that filled at once usually counts as taker and the later fills as maker.
Each side has its trade-off. The taker gets speed and certainty but buys at the ask and sells at the bid, giving up the spread, and a large order also suffers slippage as it eats through several price levels. The maker gets the price they chose but may never be filled, or only partly, if the market moves away. There is a subtler risk too: a resting bid tends to fill exactly when the price is falling through it, so makers often get filled when the market is turning against them.
Exchanges may charge the two sides differently. Many overseas exchanges, futures markets especially, charge makers less than takers, and some very high-volume tiers even pay makers a rebate. Some Korean won markets charge both sides the same rate. Rates change often with the exchange, the market, the customer's tier and promotions, so check the exchange's fee page for current figures.
There is an order condition that guarantees maker status. A "post only" limit order is cancelled instead of executed if it would fill immediately, so it can only ever rest on the book. It is common on overseas exchanges, and Upbit has supported it in its Open API, the interface for trading programs, since July 2, 2025. Trading bots that want lower fees or that quote both sides of the book use it most.
Buying and selling pressure is read from the taker side. Public trade feeds tag each fill as a buy or a sell, and the tag normally shows what the taker did. Since every fill has a buyer and a seller, "more buyers than sellers" makes no literal sense; a run of taker buys means buyers are impatient enough to pay the ask rather than wait. Steady taker buying clears the ask side level by level and lifts the price; steady taker selling clears the bids and pushes it down.
The kimchi premium usually jumps when takers pile into one side. When Korean buyers rush in with market orders that clear ask after ask, won prices outrun overseas prices and the premium widens; heavy market selling in Korea pushes it toward a reverse premium. Arbitrage traders lean the other way to close the gap. An arbitrageur who takes liquidity on both legs, buying abroad and selling in Korea, pays the spread and the taker fee twice, so what is left is smaller than the premium on screen.
CoinGaja's Whale Trade Radar uses the side tag straight from the public trade feeds of the four Korean exchanges' won markets: a fill where someone bought resting sell orders is a buy (red), and one where someone sold into resting buy orders is a sell (blue). A big taker order fills in pieces across several price levels, so the radar merges fills of the same exchange, coin and side that come within one second into one order, and keeps those of ₩5,000,000 (about $3,600) or more for an hour. A big maker order that fills bit by bit against many small takers may therefore never show up as one large dot. The Kimchi Premium Calculator fills your amount through the live order book like a market order, in other words as a taker, and takes off fees and slippage.
Example
Coin A's book: lowest ask ₩1,001, highest bid ₩1,000 (tick size ₩1)
A limit buy at ₩1,000 does not fill at once; it rests on the book → maker
A limit buy at ₩1,001 (or a market buy) fills against the resting ask at once → taker, paying 1 ÷ 1,000 = 0.1% more than the maker price
On an exchange assumed to charge makers 0.02% and takers 0.05%, a ₩10,000,000 (about $7,100) fill costs ₩2,000 as a maker and ₩5,000 as a taker
Twenty such fills a day → (5,000 − 2,000) × 20 = ₩60,000 (about $43) difference
A market buy of 20,000 coins at ₩3,000 → ₩60,000,000 (about $42,900) of taker buying → a red dot on the Whale Trade Radar (above its ₩5,000,000 threshold)
※ Example numbers, for illustration only
See it on CoinGaja
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