When it comes to trading, the topic becomes hotter and hotter.
I still remember when in 2017 different “training groups” suggested their fellows to subscribe in all the exchanges “to get access to every market”. Well, reality has never been so distorted. If a person is not able to trade, why should him register into multiple platforms?
It’s like a famous speech from a famous movie. “This is a mission for a single person or 100.000”. And in my opinion, in 99% of cases one good Exchange is enough.
Let’s now have a look.
I think I have been one of the first accounts on BINANCE and I even remember that for a while, at the end of 2017 they suspended new subscriptions. They could not manage so many data and so much volume. This event made me a very strong believer in Binance from the beginning because they prove from their first steps that they were working seriously and in a properly fair way!
Here you can find a chart reliable enough with different exchanges parameters, such as 24h Volume, Web Traffic (related to the number of users), number of different markets and their starting date.
In my opinion, Binance, Bithumb, Kraken, Huobi are now the best exchange solutions. They are all Centralized Exchanges and they are the best in terms of reliability, liquidity, historicy.
Since the evaluation of the Wallets has found a lot of interest, let’s keep the same format.
Binance opened gates in July 2017 and has now 883 active markets with a 24h volume that exceeds 24 billions of USD. It has margin trading, Futures trading, Spot trading, lending and staking solutions. It has included the IEO Lauchpad with a Blockchain startup incubator. It has great trading fees that can be reduced with the amount of money traded and by using BNB coin to pay trading fees. Trading fees starts from 0.1% and can be immediately lowered by a 10% (using the link here ) and another 25% by using Binance Coin (BNB).
Security: 4
Liquidity: 5
Number of markets: 5
User-friendliness: 5
Fees: 5
Kraken is among the oldest crypto-exchanges and it was founded in July 2011. It does not present lot of markets since the guideline of the issuing company was keeping the liquidity concentrated into a restricted amount of markets, that are 185 and the 24h volume exceeds 1 billion USD. It presents a reliable and expert OTC support.
Security: 4
Liquidity: 3
Number of markets: 3
User-friendliness: 3
Fees: 4
Huobi Global is another great exchange, with particular interest from Asian and eastern countries. Its fees are not particularly convenient for retail traders, while they become really low (as low as 0.0097%) for professional investors. Number of markets is comparable to the Binance one and the 24h volume exceeds 17 billions of USD.
Security: 4
Liquidity: 5
Number of markets: 5
User-friendliness: 5
Fees: 3
Bithumb is an Exchange from Korea and when you open it a huge number of symbols welcome you, until you do not find the “ENG” version. Its fees are the highest among the exchanges examined here. At the moment it presents 122 markets and a 24h Volume lower than 800 millions of USD. It presents the staking and lending features.
Security: 4
Liquidity: 2
Number of markets: 2
User-friendliness: 4
Fees: 2
In this comparison I did not mentioned COINBASE Pro, since I still do not consider it a real trading platform for retails since fees start from 0.5%, and unless you trade monthly equivalent volume higher than 100.000$, it will present the highest fees among these exchanges. I personally use and recommend Coinbase Pro (and Binance as well) for buying and selling cryptocurrencies against fiat, because they have a really fast and user-friendly onboarding procedure.
We then have the Decentralized Exchange, but I will produce a dedicated article on it.
I personally use Binance to trade, with BNB fee discounts and sharing my 10% discount code with all the people that I can, since I now know how much I could have saved until now with just a 10% discount!
Pay attention to another factor that is the withdrawal fee: in some cases they are in percentage on the withdrawing amount, while in others it is a flat fee. In case of a flat fee, the more withdrawals you will make, the more in you pay and in this case larger volume of withdrawals (and a reduced number) are suggested.
What platform do you use for trading? Let me know in the comments to share insights and intels.
