The Beginners Guide to Crypto Currency Exchange
4 min readCryptocurrency Exchange or Digital Currency Exchange is a business that involves the exchange of cryptocurrency with other assets such as money or any other digital currency. It is a web service that provides electronic transactions in electronic forms and taking fees for them.
Any transactions or operations to Digital Currency Exchange can be made through debit and credit cards, postal money order or any other kinds of money transfer. This article is about discussing the various cryptocurrency exchanges which facilitate crypto currency trading for beginners and what they offer in terms of availability, ease of use, security, deposit/withdrawal methods and fees. We hope this guide to cryptocurrency trading can help you get started with cryptocurrency exchanges.
Coinbase/GDAX
Coinbase is one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges based in San Francisco, California. It is available in 32 countries and currently serves over 10 million customers. Launched in 2012, it has an easy to use interface that makes Digital Currency Exchange an easy task for a non-technical person. It is also available for both iOS and Android. Unfortunately, Coinbase doesn’t provide crypto currency mining for beginners and is only an exchange.
As of now, it offers four coins, BTC, BTC Cash, ETH, and Litecoin. It exchanges digital currency with US dollars, Euros and Great British Pounds. With minimum transfer fees, Coinbase has never experienced any security breach which makes it a perfect platform for digital currency exchange. In addition to that, Coinbase also offers a fully-fledged advanced exchange called GDAX. It offers more advanced features and different and better trading fees than Coinbase.
Bitstamp
Bitstamp is another platform that provides digital currency exchange. It is relatively easy to use and offers more advanced features via TradeView. Bitstamp offers coins such as BTC, Litecoin, ETH, BTC Cash and ripple. It exchanges digital currency with US dollars and Euro. You can put into practice all the latest crypto currency trading techniques in this exchange.
It offers Flat deposits via bank transfers and supports debit/credit cards. Perhaps the only drawback one can find in Bitstamp is slightly high fees and the fact that it suffered one security breach in 7 years of its operation. Nonetheless, it is one the most reliable exchanges. It is available in both iOS and android.
Gemini
Gemini is a UK based company launched in 2015 by Winklevoss twins. It is available in few countries including U.S, Canada, Hong-Kong, Singapore and South Korea. One of the downsides to this platform is that it is not particularly user friendly. So, beginners are not recommended to use this platform.
It offers two coins and 1 FLAT currency BTC Cash, Ehtereum and US Dollars. Gemini follows strict protocols when it comes to security and as of 2018, it has not encountered a single security breach thus making it one of the most secure and reliable digital currency platform. However, it is important to have digital currency investment strategies before you start trading.
Digital Ticks
Digital ticks is a modern crypto exchange that aims to be a game changer in this sector. They have implemented many of the latest techniques which makes it easy for anyone to get started with trading.
It has a unique feature called a Single Portfolio View that would enable the traders to see all the holding positions on one single portfolio. It would be easy for traders to make informed decisions regarding the cryptocurrency exchange by using this unique feature. It also supports BTC, ETH, Litecoin and Dashcoin.
Kraken
Kraken is one of the oldest cryptocurreny exchange platform. Launched in 2011, kraken is the biggest exchange in terms of volume and liquidity for EUR trading pairs. It serves worldwide including the US.
Kraken offers a variety of coins including BTC Cash, ETH, Monero, Augur, Litecoin and many more. It also supports deposit/withdrawals via bank transfers and cryptocurrencies. Having a not so friendly user interface, it also suffers from stability and performance issues but nonetheless, it is good platform for cryptocurrency exchanges.
Bitfinex
Bitfinex is the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform. Launched in 2012, it has an easy to use interface and offers advanced number of features such as margin trading, margin funding etc. It is available for both iOS and android platforms. It offers BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, IOTA, XMR and NEO.
Just like the previous cryptocurrency exchanges, it supports withdrawals using US dollars and Euros via bank transfers. Bitfinex has suffered two security breaches, the first one was in May 2015, which resulted in a loss of $330,000. And the second one on August 2016 that resulted in a loss of worth $72 million.
EtherDelta
EtherDelta is a decentralized exchange that directly supports peer to peer connection. It is very different from the previously discussed cryptocurrency exchanging platform. Here, funds are held in a smart contract on a ETH network which you are solely responsible for depositing and withdrawing from. Currently, EtherDelta only supports Ehtereum based tokens.
EtherDelta has a rather confusing interface that makes it difficult for users to perform cryptocurrency exchange operations. In one occasion, someone tried to buy 750 Kyber for 0.007 ETH each but ended up buying 0.007 KNC at 750 ETH.
Conclusion
After looking at the various cryptocurrency exchanging platforms, we can safely say that Coinbase and Bitstamp stands out in terms of its good features like security, user friendly interface, multiple withdraws/transfer methods and many more.
I would not call them perfect but I would recommend that it is the safest bet you can make. Every cryptocurrency exchanging platform are unique in its own way and has both advantages and disadvantages. We just have to select the one that suits our needs. We hope that this guide on basic crypto currency exchange and trading would give you a head start in your journey of Cryptocurrency trading.
