Binance is a fairly new exchange located in China. Despite being a fairly new exchange it is one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges at the moment due to it’s high number of available coins, speedy transactions, low fees and relative simplicity of its interface. In fact, it’s matching engine is capable of processing around 1.4 million transactions per second, which makes it one of the fastest exchanges on the market. It works as a crypto to crypto exchange and does not offer any fiat exchange, unlike Coinbase or Coinmama.
A level 2 account gives a 100 BTC daily withdrawal limit but will require photo ID verification. This is where you simply upload a photo of your ID and Binance with approve that you are who you say you are. There are even higher limits available but for that you’ll have to contact Binace directly.
Once you have a working account, you’ll need to add some funds to it. For this example we’ll assume you already have some Bitcoin in a wallet available to you.
If you visit the Funds tab in the top menu, then click on Deposits / Withdrawals. This will bring up a page of all of the current cryptocurrencies that Binance supports. You need to then find Bitcoin in this list and click on the Deposit button on the right hand side of the page.
This will give you a Binance wallet address that you can send funds to and begin trading.
Even the basic version obviously isn’t particularly beginner friendly but after a few minutes of reading around and you should have a good enough understanding to be able to make your first trade on Binance. To make it even easier, we’ll go through the basics here.
The left hand side of the screen will give you the recent trades, the green are what people have bought and the pink are what people have sold.
The middle section is split into two halves. The bottom half is your buy and sell options. You can set specific prices using the limits tab or you can buy at market price. You are given the option to buy with 25, 50, 75 and 100% of your total currency holdings.
The upper part is dedicated to the trading graphs that can be customised with different times and layouts. These graphs are compared to the currency that you have chosen to buy your altcoin in. For example if you want to buy Cardano (ADA) with Ethereum (ETH) then your graph will be the price of Cardano compared to Ethereum.
To change the currency that you are buying in requires you to go to the right hand side of the page. Here you will find the currency pairs and be able to easily switch between the options whilst also choosing your favourites. The current options are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB) and Tether (USDT).
The bottom half of the right hand side of the screen is dedicated to displaying the market and your trade history for that specific crypto pair.
We’re going to skip the breakdown of the advanced view as beginners can get by without using it. If you are a more advanced user then you might want to know that only limit and market orders are available at the moment. Quite a disadvantage to some users.
Overall, trading on Binance is very good. It may take a little while to learn if you’re an absolute beginner, but it is far from difficult.
It has a slightly more specific process for charging withdrawal fees. This is done on a specific coin basis and therefore changes with each currency. For example, 0.0005 is the fee when withdrawing Bitcoin. 0.005 for Ether. 1 for Cardano. 0.01 for Litecoin. You get the idea. A more in depth breakdown of the fee structure can be found here.
There isn’t a limit on the amount of crypto you can deposit but withdrawal limits do apply. Like mentioned before different stages of Binance identity verification are required to withdraw greater amounts of currency.
The best way to see the huge range of coins available is to go to the Binance website itself.
In early February 2018 there was a Binance outage that was claimed to be an upgrade of their security system. Assuming that this is to be believed then that is a positive point to the safety of Binance. If however, the rumours are to be believed and it was some form of hack then we’d be less convinced of their security systems. Either way, Binance say that no one’s data or coins were affected.
We’d highly recommend that if you are keeping any amount of cryptocurrency on an exchange, that you take it off and store it in a wallet. We’ve run through the best Ethereum wallets here, many of which can be used for other altcoins. Better yet, buy a hardware wallet, such as the Ledger Nano S.
There is also a rather helpful FAQ section of the website that will likely answer a lot of questions you might have.
We would also recommend to take as many safety precautions as possible. Like with all cryptocurrencies, you are not able to retrieve any lost or stolen coins so we’d recommend storing coins on Binance (or any exchange) for as little time as possible. Instead move them to your own private wallet where you know they’ll be safe.
