Skimming small, frequent profits off many trades instead of waiting for one big one.
Scalping is the shortest-horizon style of trading: positions are opened and closed within minutes, sometimes seconds, aiming to capture small price fluctuations rather than a sustained trend. Each individual trade yields a modest gain, but executed often enough, those gains compound over a session.
Because the profit margin per trade is thin, scalping only works with low transaction costs, high trade frequency, and strict discipline — a strategy easily wrecked by exactly the fee structures and emotional decision-making that make small-account crypto trading difficult in practice.