Binance vs Kucoin – Which Exchange is More Profitable?

Binance

Binance grew from obscurity to being the largest cryptocurrency trading exchange in the world by 24 hour volume in a mere 6 months. The CEO of Binance, 41 year old Chinese-Canadian Changpeng Zhao, appeared number 3 on the Forbes Cryptocurrency Rich List. Binance is fast, reliable and straight to the point. It’s a crypto-to-crypto trading platform with a simple UI, high trade volumes and a great list of coin pairs.

Should you buy Binance Coin?

Binance’s BNB allows people to half their fees on any trade by using BNB to pay the fees instead of the trading pair. Over the long run, this is extremely useful, and if you’re ever making more than a few trades, it’s worth it to buy BNB. The BNB trading pairs themselves have decent volumes and are usually arbitraged to Bitcoin and Ethereum pair prices instantly. The importance of the token to the exchange’s fundamentals means that as crypto volumes grow, so does the price and value of BNB. It features on our list of 5 Safest Cryptocurrency Bets for 2018 for exactly this reason.

Verdict: BNB is an integral part of the ecosystem for one of the largest and fastest growing exchanges in the world. If you’re just buying Bitcoin and holding, without making any trades, it won’t be useful to you. But the moment you start making trades on Binance, BNB becomes worth it.

Binance has been relatively stable considering their insane growth last year, huge volumes and influx of new users. They went down for 36 hours on Feb 8th 2018, but the CEO and team had constant updates, clearing doubts about being hacked or the safety of the funds. The trading fees are very low if you use BNB, but the withdrawal fees and limits, especially for ERC20 tokens, are almost criminally large. Still, they have to extract value from you somewhere.

Pros of Binance

• Simple design, good mobile app and intuitive trading
• Instant commission from referral trades on the referral program
• High trade volumes leads to better pricing

Cons of Binance

• Huge influx of bots removes most of the good pricing opportunities in low volume pairs
• Extortionate withdrawal fees and high withdrawal limits for most coins
• They don’t allow new user registrations for large periods of time

Register and join the Binance Referral Program here.

Kucoin

Kucoin is a mixed bag. It’s another Hong Kong based exchange that grew into popularity largely because of their Kucoin Shares platform and their referral scheme. Their english translations never make sense, and it’s a journey to decipher what they even mean most of the time. They also release new cryptocurrencies pretty much every week, which includes low marketcap gems that wouldn’t be found anywhere except Etherdelta.

Should you buy Kucoin Shares?

Kucoin’s very own token distributes dividends based on the exchange’s volume, with half of all fees being split among the circulating KCS. Holding KCS gives daily dividends to the tune of 0.1%, as you can see from this website. Combine holding KCS with inviting new users via their referral program, and suddenly the passive crypto income from this exchange can become substantial. Like BNB, KCS trading also reduces your trading fee.

Verdict: Buy KCS if you want to hold for a year or more and collect passive income from its dividends. Not even factoring in growth in exchange volumes, and increase in price of the tokens, you’re looking at a minimum 5% return.

I’ve personally had some problems with Kucoin’s functionality – the referral bonuses extraction get stuck sometimes (why do they even need to be extracted? Make it real time like Binance). The exchange itself gets deposit/withdrawal problems, but these are solved by the team relatively quickly. It’s the nonexistent support, broken English that they don’t want to fix, and bugs in the exchange that make it less reliable. They also unexpectedly stopped the Kucoin referral program on January 12th – new signups won’t get the benefit of the 50% fees from referral commission right now.

Pros of Kucoin

• Good design and good UI/UX
• Customisable charts since they use Tradingview
• Access to many different markets, including Bitcoin Cash, USD Tether, Kucoin Shares and Ethereum pairs.
• Ever-growing selection of small and mid-sized gems
• Fairly decent withdrawal limits before having to verify with KYC

Cons of Kucoin

• Well known bugs aren’t fixed, in favour of adding new coins and tokens every week
• Poor support, lack of communication and confusing English throughout
• Kucoin Shares, NEO dividends and referral bonuses sometimes don’t pay out for days (another bug)

Register and join the Kucoin Referral Program here.

—

Note: This article includes our exchange referral links.