The crypto-sphere is slowly transforming into one of the greatest technological gold mines in the world. From what seemed like a small market where investors would trade around their digital tokens, cryptocurrency markets have undergone a massive transformation in both design and purpose in the past few years. From the simple crypto exchange, users can now access new and improved products and features on crypto markets.
These products include leveraged tokens, over-the-counter (OTC) trades, futures contracts, high-margin trading, and tokenized stocks.
Among the most sought-after crypto-exchange platforms are FTX and Binance. In this review, we’ll look into each one of them, and by the end of it all, we’ll define which between the two is the better choice.
Why don’t we start with a brief overview of the two?
Brief Overview
Both FTX and Binance are crypto-derivatives. They have a handful of similarities to offer, the most popular being the mode of exchange and the services offered within each. However, they also differ in several ways.
Binance is the number one crypto exchange market in the game. It harbors considerable volumes in exchange options and the derivatives sector. For instance, besides offering up to 125× leverage tokens, Binance also includes Vanilla options and perpetual futures contracts.
On the other hand, FTX comes fifth in ranking in the crypto-exchange market. FTX offers derivatives trading, quarterly futures markets, and up to 101× on leveraged tokens.
FTX Review
What is FTX?
It is a cryptocurrency exchange platform that comes with numerous markets to trade from. Examples of such markets are futures, derivatives, volatility index trading, prediction markets, leveraged tokens, stocks, and much more. The platform was founded in 2009 by Alameda Research and manages an upward of $100 million in various cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Moreover, the platform has invested in several cryptos and blockchain-focused companies and organizations. Currently, the FTX platform can be used as a substitute for Blockfolio.
The average FTX’s 24-hour trading volume is estimated to be around $3,400,000 from more than its 579 trading pairs. Even when the trading pairs seem little compared to other cryptocurrency platforms like Binance, FTX is increasingly gaining popularity in recent times. However, FTX does not offer its services to users based in the United States.
What is the FTT Token?
The FTT token is the native FTX’s cryptocurrency. It is a utility token designed to draw users to join the FTX platform and, most importantly, encourage them to participate in the offered trading activities.
How does FTT encourage users to participate in trading?
FTT tokens offer luring incentives, like discounting your FTX trading fee by a range of 3% to 60%, only for holding FTT tokens in your FTX account. There are additional perks aside from that, most of which are earned through staking FTT.
Moreover, staking FTT increases your chances of earning higher referral rate bonuses, getting airdrops for newly-introduced tokens, and maker (trading) fees. Other additional bonuses come in handy, like daily waivers for outbound Ethereum gas fees, seeing what tokens will be listed next on FTX, and access to tickets to participate in IEOs. (Initial Exchange Operations)
How to Deposit and Withdraw on FTX
Here, we’ll look into the various deposit and withdrawal options that FTX offers.
FTX’s withdrawal options and deposit options for fiat currencies are somewhat limited, unlike other Cryptocurrency platforms like Binance. It means that FTX does not cover funds through popular mediums like Apple Pay, Banxa, Simplex, and Paypal, among others. However, you’ll get to transact via Bank and International wire transfer and any authorized Mastercard and Visa Card.
How much are the fees in FTX?
FTX fee rates are much lower if we compare them to what you get in Binance. Trading and withdrawal fees are much subsidized, thanks to the benefits one enjoys just by owning FTT tokens, which lowers trading fees by a substantial amount. Speaking of that, the lower overall transaction fees could be so valuable to huge-volume cryptocurrency investors. In other cases, you might not be charged transaction fees on FTX! Some great news for you there.
How to Invest and Trade with FTX
Let’s look into the overall investing and trading experience on the FTX platform.
As you might already know, FTX has numerous crypto-trading markets, aside from conventional spot trading. Let’s analyze the various markets to get more information.
- Futures Market – As the name states, the Futures market involves ‘prediction.’ Most cryptocurrency exchange platforms trade through the rise and fall of a given crypto asset’s price. For instance, you may bet that the price of a specific asset will either rise or fall by the end of a particular month. If your prediction is correct, then you win the possible winning amount on your ticket. If not, then you lose.
Among FTX’s most common cryptocurrency futures contracts deal with top-flight tokens like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
- Stocks – The stock market is flooded with hundreds of opportunities from all kinds of companies to invest in. On the same note, FTX offers you tokenized stocks/shares from organizations like Airbnb, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Gamestop, Facebook, Google, AMC, and more. However, unlike regular stocks trading, where transactions are in fiat currency, we use cryptos when trading with real-time stocks in FTX. Again, unlike in regular stocks trading, FTX tokenized variants can be further divided into smaller units.
- Volatility Index Trading – This is where you keep an eye on a specific asset that is underpriced and observe its performance in a fixed time frame of your choice. Later, if the asset’s market behavior appeals to you, then you can give it a try to see if you’ll make a profit from market volatility.
- Leveraged Tokens – Leveraged tokens are designed to keep track of an asset with increasing leverage. The use of these tokens gives you the advantage of eliminating the possibility of liquidation. FTX has several such tokens, with the BNB BULL being among the most popular of them. The BNBBULL yields 3×daily return more than Binance’s BNB and other famous crypts.
- Prediction Markets – The popular idea of sports betting is slowly getting into the crypto industry, only that here we don’t deal with fiat currency. In FTX, you get the chance to predict future events and earn if your prediction is correct.
The final word on FTX
You can think of the FTX platform as a young crypto-exchange platform that’s facing exponential growth with every day that passes. FTX recently introduced a feature called the Quant Zone, which aims at helping its customers to create specific automated trading algorithms to suit their needs. Moreover, the overall reduced trading and transaction fees bring a sense of admiration from ‘heavy’ investors. If all goes well for FTX, then we’ll be looking at one of the most successful and popular crypto-exchange platforms in the next few years.
Binance Review
What is Binance?
Binance is the leading cryptocurrency exchange market in the world as of now. It has an amazingly colossal user volume, counting more than 13 million active users worldwide. Moreover, it has consistently command the highest trading volume and liquidity among other exchanges, by a long shot. Those figures are achieved through Binance’s high number of possible trading pairs (1219).
Binance was founded in 2017. It now offers some of the most diverse crypto-trading options and multiple lucrative and complex markets.
As stated earlier, FTX has a vast number of trading options than Binance. However, Binance comes with more than double the number of trading pairs in FTX, making it the more flexible option. Therefore, users can combine different items to form favorable trading pairs and thus giving them more control over their trading expeditions. Again deeper pools of liquidity and more obscure items are likely to be more available on Binance than FTX.
Concerning availability, Binance is more popular than FTX and even comes with a US subsidiary to cater to US-based users.
What is the BNB token on Binance?
The BNB and BUSD are Binance’s native cryptocurrencies.
How do BNB and BUSD encourage users to participate in trading?
The BUSD coin adds a nonvolatile and safe transfer of crypto within Binance. On the other hand, BNB acts like FTT tokens. It is among the most powerful cryptocurrencies and was designed to introduce and incentivize users to the Binance exchange. Apart from its lucrative appreciative value, holding BNB in your account earns you close to 25% trading fee discounts and up to 20% for referrals.
How to Deposit and Withdraw on Binance.
Binance is by far more flexible in terms of transactions than FTX. It supports the British Pound, USD, CAD, AUD, and over 40 more popular currencies worldwide. There are numerous options to acquire trading items on Binance, including bank transfers, credit and debit cards, and third-party options like Paypal, Western Union, and more.
How Much fees do you incur in Binance?
Binance processes a tier-based fee structure to indicate your trading volumes and every transaction fee associated. From an FTX point of view, Binance’s fees are very high; in fact, five times as high as in FTX. However, the good news is that Binance allows you to reduce these transaction fees significantly by offering you various discounts on BNB trade.
However high the fees on Binance may seem when compared to FTX’s, they are low compared to the fees on other cryptocurrency markets.
How to trade and invest with Binance
When compared to FTX, Binance lacks diversity and adequate depth of derivatives products. However, unlike FTX, it offers more lucrative and riskier investments in the form of decentralized finance. That includes services like making stakes and earning from passive and safe rewards. You can also earn from liquidity pools, instant crypto lending, and participating in creating new tokens in mining pools.
You can invest in virtually anything, as Binance offers you the chance to trade with your idle assets as well as lucrative futures contracts that offer up to 125× leverage. The leveraged tokens expose you to either long or short-term profit margins of around 4×.
Moreover, just like in FTX, Binance offers you the chance to participate in stock trading. It enables you to buy real-time shares from popular companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, Airbnb, MicroStrategy, Coinbase, etc.
In a nutshell, when you combine the leveraged token market and stocks trading options in Binance, they cannot match the numerous trading markets in FTX.
What else could you do in Binance?
Binance has grown past ‘just a trading’ platform. It is one of the greatest-growing cryptocurrency ecosystems you can find. There are hundreds of crypto perks in the Binance ecosystem, all of which are easy to access and use. For instance, Binance has created a Binance Trust wallet that you can use to store cryptocurrency and NFT. It serves more than 5,000,000 investors and supports over 160,000 different assets, NFTs, and more.
Binance has also gone a step further to introduce the Binance Visa. You can now swipe to pay with the Binance Visa Card in organizations where the service is supported. There are minimal-to-no charges associated with the mode of payment, and you could earn up to 8% cashback on your purchase when you use the card.
Conclusion
Looking at the review on the Binance Vs. FTX crypto exchange platform, then you realize why each platform has attracted many loyal users. Binance’s ease-of-use and multiple trading options give it a competitive edge over the rest of the platforms. The liquidity of the operations in Binance is another plus, and the numerous trading pairs give users multiple combinations to choose from.
Again, it does not have many location restrictions like FTX and offers a handful of other vital payment options above the latter. Moreover, the platform has gone a step further to introduce a Binance Visa Card, a new and flexible form of payment, just like your regular Visa Card. That is another reason to stay!
FTX, on the other hand, boasts a broad market of trading options, even when its minimum trade pairs are few, compared to Binance. Again, transaction fees within the FTX platform are minimized completely, and it only gets better when you can get lucrative bonuses by holding FTT in your account.
To wrap up, Binance should be your choice if you’re torn between these two crypto-exchange markets. Its flexibility is second to none in the cryptocurrency world.
However, that does not mean FTX is a bad platform at all. It is still in its youth and has shown incredible growth since its inception, and offers a few nuanced benefits over Binance. If you’re looking for a platform with minimal transaction fees, then FTX is home!
Bernard currently works full-time as a growth hacker and content researcher for HUSTLR. When he was studying in the US 2 years ago, he flipped Yeezys on eBay as a side hustle to fund his degree and living expenses. He’s currently working on his Amazon FBA business & dropshipping on the side.
