Exchanges 101: How do I get started buying & selling crypto?

Coin Clarity’s Ultimate Guide to Cryptocurrency Exchanges

This guide is aimed to inform those who would like to buy, sell or trade cryptocurrencies (and tokens) of all kinds. First of all, it is important to understand what bitcoin (BTC) is (hint: it’s the original and mother of all “coins,” another word for cryptocurrency) and how to use it before going about trying to purchase it or do anything with it whatsoever. We can’t stress the importance of knowing what you are doing before you do it enough.

The good news about cryptocurrency trading is,  you don’t have to have an in-depth understand of cryptography, the programming language behind the Bitcoin Core software or how bitcoin mining works. The bad news is, you do have to know how to move coins around and store them securely, otherwise you run a strong risk of losing them for good. Remember: cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible – they are one-way – unlike traditional fiat currency banking transactions.

Therefore, it’s a good a good idea to educate yourself on how to safely secure your coins in a personal cryptocurrency wallet of your own before moving them to an exchange wallet, as there is a big difference between the two. Chiefly, you control the coins kept in a personal wallet, whereas you are entrusting an exchange to keep your coins for you. So, you don’t want to get roped into sending your coins to an untrustworthy exchange or sending them to the wrong address, because as we said, there’s a good chance they will be gone forever if you do this.

If this all sounds scary to you, that’s because transacting with cryptocurrencies is a delicate and highly unregulated process which requires some mastery of the technology to make sure you don’t get ripped off or do something foolish that you may regret for a long time to come. But don’t worry, we at Coin Clarity are here to provide you with the knowledge you need to feel confident in what you are doing to help prevent financial loss and promote financial gain. Without further ado, let’s get started, shall we?

I. What is a cryptocurrency exchange?

A cryptocurrency exchange (or digital currency exchange) operates on the same principles of a stock market exchange or stock exchange platform, except for instead of exchanging money for stocks, you are exchanging bitcoin for altcoins, or altcoins for other altcoins, or altcoins for tokens — or tokens for other tokens. Unlike stock trading platforms or brokers that only allow you to trade money for stocks or vice-versa, and do not allow you to trade stocks for other stocks, this is not the case with cryptocurrency exchanges. Some coins/tokens can be purchased directly using fiat currency or USDT (USD Tether – an altcoin whose value is pegged to that of the U.S. dollar). Though most cryptocurrency trades involve trading bitcoin for another altcoin, trading pairs not involving bitcoin at all are becoming more and more common, and indeed we will get into that soon. But first, let’s go through the different types of cryptocurrency exchanges available for your use, shall we?

A. Bitcoin Exchanges. A bitcoin exchange is exactly that — an online currency exchange which allows you to buy, sell and trade bitcoin using a number of fiat currencies. By far and away, the most successful – and easiest to use – bitcoin exchange is Coinbase. One of the longest lasting, most trustworthy, and secure exchanges still in existence, Coinbase has been in operation since 2012, and in this 5+ year time period they have yet to suffer any hacks, server crashes or mishaps that resulted in the loss of user funds. They make it super easy to attach a bank account or credit card to their website and explains the process of buying, selling, and transferring your bitcoin (or Ethereum, or litecoin), in a highly detailed, yet easy to understand manner.

For the total bitcoin noob, we definitely recommend Coinbase as a good starting place. They provide you with your own bitcoin wallet, they have a nice mobile app, and for the advanced user, offer a wide variety of trading options through their advanced exchange known as GDAX. If there’s one complaint we have about Coinbase, its that they are not available for service in many parts of the world, including several states within the U.S. This is because they are heavily involved in maintaining compliance with local and federal jurisdictional issues, as they are trying their darndest to be a legitimate company in hopes of eventually being listed on a major U.S.-based stock exchange.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up a Coinbase account, buy and sell bitcoins (and now litecoins and Ethereum) and then move them around, we highly suggest you read our Bitcoin 101 Guide, as the same principles that apply to using Coinbase pretty much apply to the other well-respected bitcoin exchanges as well. Some of these other exchanges, which have also withstood the test of time and thereby earned respect in our book are included below.

What are the best cryptocurrency exchanges?

– Kraken: Founded in 2011 and also headquartered in San Francisco (home of all-things hi-tech), Kraken has been around even longer than Coinbase. The only problem is, its registration process is a bit of a hassle and its daily trading volume is only a fraction of that of other major exchanges. While it does offer BTC and ETH pairs for major currencies like the USD, JPY, CNY, GBP, and RUB (it also boasts the “highest trading volume of the BTC/EUR pair,” though this information is quite possibly outdated by now). In addition to BTC and ETH, Kraken also offers trading pairs with several other cryptocurrencies including ETC, DASH, GNO, ICN, LTC, MLN, REP, XRP, ZEC, STR, and now BCH. Kraken was one of the first exchanges to offer margin trading and, much like Coinbase’s GDAX, offers several advanced trading features for the more sophisticated trader.

– Bitfinex: Based out of Taiwan, Bitfinex has been in operation since 2014 and is the world’s largest BTC exchange in the world, doing over 10% of BTC trades on a daily basis. Despite suffering a hack in 2016 that led to the disappearance of $72,000,000 in user BTC funds, Bitfinex remains #1, although because of the hack they no longer offer BTC/USD pairs and offer exclusively BTC/CNY pairs. Much like Kraken, they include fiat pairs with a large number of altcoins, including the trading of Bitcoin Gold (BTG) futures. As of April 2017, they had effectively repaid their users of all stolen funds.

– Bitstamp: Also founded in 2011, Bitstamp is the longest standing bitcoin exchange still in existence. It is based in Luxembourg, a country known as being highly liberal and accepting when it comes to bitcoin-related industry operations (ala blockchain.info – one of the most highly trusted and secured wallet platforms). Though Bitfinex suffered a severe DDOS attack in 2014 which managed to shut down operations until the company had reorganized its security measures several days later, and then faced a hack only a few months later, in which 19,000 bitcoins were stolen, it only took them a week to re-open operations. Like Bitfinex, the company absorbed all losses affected by the hack and now offers some of the tightest opsec measures of any of the major exchanges. Bitfinex offers USD and EUR pairs in a limited number of cryptocurrencies, including XRP, LTC and ETH.

– HitBTC: This is a rather new, Europe-based exchange that officially opened in 2014 and has already weathered a few attacks and criticisms, before bouncing back to achieve an “$100,000,000 market cap” by 2017 (according to them; however, their trading volume is currently a bit lackluster compared to the other exchanges listed above, so this information may no longer be current). While HitBTC fiat pairs are exclusively in EUR, they do offer USDT pairs through which you can trade 20+ altcoins. This exchange is one of the first of the bitcoin/altcoin exchange hybrids and has an extremely easy registration process, like most altcoin exchanges. In case you are wondering what the difference between an altcoin and a bitcoin exchange is, well, we’re about to get into that right now.

B. Altcoin Exchanges

So, what exactly is an altcoin exchange? It’s basically the same idea as a bitcoin exchange, except for instead of trading fiat currency for bitcoin (or another altcoin), you are trading bitcoin for another altcoin, or one altcoin for another altcoin. These exchanges usually require minimal identification or release of personal information because, unlike bitcoin exchanges, they do not involve the transfer of fiat currency and therefore are not subject to the bureaucracy or red tape that usually accompanies fiat-based transactions (such as Know Your Customer [KYC] or Anti-Money Laundering [AML] statutes. These distinctions have their pros and cons as compared to bitcoin exchanges.

The pros being they are largely anonymous and do not require the provision of bank account or other personally-identifying information, since bitcoin itself has not universally been accepted as legal tender in most countries (Japan being a major exception). This speeds up the process of depositing and withdrawing Bitcoin (cryptocurrency) funds tremendously, whereas there is usually a “clearance” period involved when using fiat currency to directly buy bitcoin or other altcoins. This clearance period can sometimes take days, or even weeks at a time, before the bitcoin is finally deposited into your account/wallet.

The cons being this very lack of regulation and customer identification makes it easier for altcoin exchanges to suddenly close up shop, taking all the coins left on them by users in the process, without any prior warning, in an all too common experience known as an “exit scam.” Altcoin exchanges are not as closely monitored by federal government financial regulatory bodies for the same reason that makes them so easy to use: they do no directly involve fiat currencies, and as such, there is not as much legally-driven incentive to provide oversight for these types of exchanges. Altcoin exchanges can freeze user funds, make them disappear, or lose them through a matter of their own incompetence with very little legal recourse for the user. A few notable altcoin “exit scams” include those of Cryptsy, Vircurex and Mintpal. The sudden and unannounced closure of these major altcoin exchanges eventually resulted in legal action being taken against all 3 since millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies were stolen or “lost” in each individual case.

Similar to the case of Coinbase, there remains only one highly trusted altcoin exchange that has also withstood the test of time, and that exchange is Poloniex. Operated in the United States, Poloniex has also had its share of trials and tribulations, but has managed to maintain operations through a number of DDOS attacks, hacks, phishing scams and ever-growing regulatory hurdles. Bureaucratic obstacles, including exclusion of residents of New York and other states impose restrictions on cryptocurrency trading have only slightly changed the way that Poloniex conducts their business practices. They currently carry over 60 BTC trading pairs, as well as a handful of pairs in ETH, XMR and USDT. This means that instead of trading bitcoin for an altcoin, you are trading Ethereum, Monero or Tether for other altcoins.

Another exchange that has been open for nearly as long as Poloniex, and also with limited interruptions is Bittrex. Bittrex boasts nearly 100 different BTC trading pairs, with a nearly equal number of ETH and USDT trading pairs as well. If there’s an altcoin out there you are trying to purchase, this is probably the best place to find it. Bittrex does over 100,000 BTC in transactions a day, and while it may not offer the same advanced functionalities as Poloniex (like margin trading and coin lending), it does feature an API system that supports custom-built programs for high-frequency trading. Bittrex has not been without its share of controversy over the years, frequently being accused of with-holding withdrawals or freezing user accounts without explanation. They are also located in the United States, and as such, frequently have to change their terms and conditions in order to suit the needs of federal cryptocurrency regulations that change on a seemingly monthly basis.

C. Token Exchanges

Token exchanges come in three different varieties: they are either entirely contained within the platforms of other coins (the most famous being NXT, NEM, Counterparty [XCP] and WAVES),  they are run independent of coin platforms by third parties, or the are known as Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), which are pretty much run by no one except for by those who create and/or download -he required software to use the exchange. In this case, a DEX is very similar to any decentralized piece of software, such as bitcoin or Ethereum. It cannot be shut down by any single entity, regulatory body, or government, and runs entirely on an independent network of users who have downloaded the software and use it to conduct their own trades.

In general, token exchanges are unique because they theoretically allow for the trading of any coin or token for any other coin or token. The main problem these exchanges currently face is lack of liquidity, meaning that just because you create an order to exchange Xcoin for Ycoin, it does not necessarily mean anybody will be interested in taking you up on your offer, or even knowing that the offer exists.

Some token exchanges allow for the trading of non-cryptocurrency tokens for bitcoin, altcoins, or blockchain-based tokens. Probably the most famous of all of these is VirWox, which specializes in the trading of gaming currencies (mainly Second Life Lindens [SLL], and to a lesser extent, Open Metaverse Currency [OMC]), for bitcoin, dollars, euros, or any number of other money exchange companies like OKPay, PayPal and other money transfer services.

II. How do you create a trade order on an exchange?

This is an extremely important point of understanding if you want to get the most out of your trade. The first and most crucial point is understanding the difference between a market order and a limit order. These are both stock market terms, so if you have any familiarity with stock trading then you probably already understand what they mean. If you don’t, let’s review the differences for you, as this knowledge can quite possibly lead to the prevention of getting ripped off by enormous proportions. Here are the three common market orders that any newbie should be aware of before placing an order; we’re showing you an example of the basic types of orders offered by Poloniex, a major and well-trusted exchange:

Market Order (Buy Order): This is the standard order is in essence, that tells the exchange, “buy me what you got for sale, at whatever the price is, of however many I want, I’ll take it.” The market in this case is dictating the price that you are paying. This may be a good thing: suppose you need a coin now and the spread between the market order and buy order is quite thin. By all means, if you see a coin that looks like a bargain, pick it up using the Market Order option. You will be payinghighest selling “bid” per coin, which may or may not be suitable to your needs. Here’s an example of a buy order for 114.92 Ripple (XRP) for a total price of 0.00329026 BTC. The “Lowest Bid” represents the lowest possible price you are paying for this coin, which in this instance, is 0.00002863 BTC.

Sell Order: this trade process works, as you might expect, in the exact opposite form of the Market Order. You are agreeing to sell your coins at the closest available Buy price, which may or may not be as large as your sell order. For instance (same goes for market orders), Say you want to unload 10,000 DOGE at 19 satoshis a pop. However, the only buyer at that price is willing to buy 1,000. This leaves you with a small profit of 19,000 satoshis and 9,000 DOGE sitting on the sell side of the order for 19 satoshis. The following is an example of a sell order for 115.01 XRP, at a price of 0.00002859 BTC per coin.

Stop/Limit Orders: These orders are a little bit confusing because they are not immediate; rather you are specifying selling and buying points that you are hoping to achieve before sale or purchase. A “Stop Order” specifies the minimum threshold at which you would be willing to sell a coin, and furthermore tends to give you a little wiggle room by placing a “Limit Order” underneath it, which acts as the absolute top floor at which you would sell a coin. Both Stop and Limit Orders work in both directions, meaning, you do not have to place one of these automated-type such orders just for selling purposes, but also for buying purposes as well. We have outlined an example of what a selling Stop Order looks like you, courtesy of Poloniex.

What you are looking at is a Stop/Limit order to sell 50 NXT at a price of .000029 BTC, or for 0.0145 BTC total (if the order was completed). The “Limit” amount refers to the maximum price of NXT that you would be willing to sell for, which would be .000030 BTC, or 0.015 BTC. Depending on the volume of your particular exchange, or depending on how quickly the price jumps around to your side or the other, you could be waiting for quite a while. So, don’t feel too stressed if it takes a while for your dream order to come true.

Custom Orders: These orders tend to be the ones that can take the most patience, because you are, in essence, setting your own price. Sure, you can put a custom Buy Order in for bitcoin for $25 a coin, but you may be waiting a very long time before it sees any action. Meanwhile, your coins are stuck on their exchange, so as we’ve previously referenced, if an exchange vanishes over night – poof – for legitimate or reason or otherwise: it doesn’t really matter, your coins are gone.

An important side point being, don’t ever leave large amounts of coins/tokens on an exchange. Especially non-decentralized exchanges or an exchange that has not as of yet proven itself trustworthy. Unless you consider yourself a big-spender, whale-type, never leave more on an exchange than you an afford to lose.

Getting back to custom orders: these are extremely common orders through which you are basically choosing the buy or sell point for your coin. Custom order won’t always give you your expected returns on the dot; sometimes the price of a coin is moving too rapidly, either slightly erasing or adding to your expected gains. Depending on your level or patience, your conviction of whether a market will go up or down, and your smarts about how to beat out the other bidders, custom orders can most frequently be the profitable way to conduct a trade (granted you are pursued by swarm of API-driven exchange bots that automatically outbid or underbid you by 1 satoshi, just to be a pain in the butt, apparently).

III. How do I know if an Exchange is Good or Right for Me?

A. Fees: Does this exchange offer competitive trading fees? From crypto-to-crypto exchanges, fees may range from the negative (meaning they pay you to deposit coins) to about $0.30 a trade. Be ware of fees much above this. Also, be wary of exchange that charge excessively large withdrawal fees (most of which they chalk up to covering “transaction costs,” while this is usually in part the truth). Exchanges that require initial coin deposits are a big red flag and we do not recommend putting your bitcoin (or other coins) in such exchanges.

B. Deposit/Withdraw confirmation times: What are the average confirmation times / block lengths necessary in order for your money to show up in your account? Some casinos will let you play with no confirmations necessary, on faith that your transaction will be eventually be included in a block on the blockchain (the first one to do so is the one who successfully “mines” the block with your transaction in it. Needless to say, most exchanges don’t operate like casinos and have much more stringent rules. They frequently include:

-3-6 confirmations on the blockchain network before the coins are spendable/withdraw-able.

– Personal Identification, such as a passport, driver’s license, or state ID.

– Provision of a valid email address, user name and password.

These are usually the necessary ID to open an account at a standard, small-to-mid size exchange. Some of the bigger exchanges, with more liquidity and trade options, also insist on being provided with:

– Full name

– Mailing Address

– Phone Number

– Verification of source of funds

C. Markers of a bad exchange: these are rather self-explanatory but just to spell it out for you, here are some of the warning signs that an exchange might not be forthright or legitimate in their business practices. Remember – altcoin exchanges, as well as bitcoin exchanges – have the ability to remain largely anonymous if they want to, a large amount of exchanges in the past 4 or 5 years have gone down by flight-by-night.

Whether it was through fault of their own or, most assuredly a security breach and/or mis-handling of funds meant a bungled securities operation, sometimes costing exchange users millions of dollars in cash. Such exchanges should not be taken seriously if they were to open under a similar name or development team. Here are some of the markings of a bad exchange:

1. Exit scams: as previously mentioned above, keep an eye out if your exchange could potentially be on the verge of pulling an exit swindle. The seedier the exchange is, the more likely this becomes a possibility. You could lose everything, and have very little to no legal recourse in getting in back. That’s why we recommend leaving as little money on an exchange as possible. If it’s an exchange that’s not particularly trustworthy, make your trade and then get out of there.
2. Lack of customer service / response to problems: There’s no more frustrating experience than being locked out of a user account, and not having any possible way to report your problems. While most major exchanges do have emails and/or phone numbers written down at the bottom of them, sometimes the best way is to stay cool, file a Customer Ticket with the exchange Support section, and give them like a week. After that, you can either refile your complaint, or complain about them publicly on the internet, which we have found, is a surprisingly effective way to resolve a complaint.
3. Deposits not received, coins stuck, withdrawals not going through: These are hallmark problems of an insolvent, incompetent or otherwise exit scam-prone exchange. Sometimes it does require a little patience for a transaction (any type of withdrawal or deposit) to go through, but trade orders should be available and credited to your exchange wallet near immediately – definitely within 5 seconds or so. If your altcoin trade doesn’t go through within 24 hours, be sure to notify Support immediately, write a calm and detailed description of the problem, and most competent exchanges are pros at handling these issues. If you find yourself at an exchange where this is not the case – customer support is uninformative, not responding, or not there at all… Well it’s time to jump ship and look for a healthier exchange.

It doesn’t matter if you have to chalk it up to loss or write-off, the lesson stands that you should always begin trades at new altcoin exchanges with small amounts of dough.

4. Liquidity problems (fractional reserve banking): An exchange may look great on the outside, low fees, hundreds of trading pairs to choose from. But how much bitcoin (or any other altcoin/token) is flowing through there on a daily basis? 100? 10? 1 BTC per 24 hrs.? If any of these are the case, you may have trouble finding the demand to meet that trade you want, which is why it is best to investigate altcoin exchange pair volume before just dumping your 100 DASH there. Some of the less reputable exchange sell user funds that are tied up in active trades on their market for the own, off-the-books pocketing. This is also sometimes the reason an exchange can’t process that withdrawal that’s been “PENDING” for weeks. So, in conclusion, go with trusted exchanges, test the smaller altcoin markets out first and never leave more money on any exchange that is going to break you banks.

IV. What are some of the biggest bitcoin exchanges in the world?

Though Coin Clarity boasts the one of the biggest collections of cryptocurrency markets in existence,(if one of our 143+ exchanges doesn’t do it for you), there is a long-time list for an alternate sources of  just about every, hole-in-the-wall, darklit and shortlived is exchange is currently in the world over. We highly recommend referencing bitcoincharts.com, if you want be amazed by exactly how many exchanges and cryptocurrency pairings there are currently out there. Here is a snapshot of biggest exchanges by BTC volume, for a quick, top 10 reference point for 11/21/17.

V. What is a good list of altcoin exchanges to get started with?

Now that we’ve gone over some of the biggest fiat-to-bitcoin markets, lets go over ten of the current largest bitcoin-to-altcoin markets:

If this list doesn’t do it for you, don’t worry, there’s over a thousand other exchanges for you to draw from, in case you’re still looking for a place to sell your obscure altcoin purchase that you may now be regretting. This top ten comes from their list, however look for exchanges with over 1,000 BTC a day in trading volume and a healthy amount of trading pairs. Some of the most popular trading pairs that different exchanges offer include:

• BTC/Altcoin
• BTC/ETH
• ETH/Altcoin
• ETH/Ethereum Token
• Litecoin/Altcoin
• DOGE/Altcoin
• XMR/Altcoin
• NXT/NXT Token
• NEM/NEM Token
• BTS/BTS Token
• BTS/Altcoin
• XCP/XCP Token
• ETC/ETC Token
• WAVES/WAVES Token
• LISK/ LISK Token

This list mathematically amounts to over 100,000 potential trading pair combinations. Some of our user-favorite and most highly voted-up exchanges, which tend to offer some pretty unique pairings, include:

• Tux Exchange
• Tradesatoshi
• alcurEX
• Bluetrade
• C-cex
• Cryptopia

VI. What are Some Recommended DEX platforms?

Outside of the platform coin exchanges (coins with exchanges built into them, like Ethereum, NXT, NEM, WAVES and LISK), there exists a series of exchanges that are, more or less completely operated without any sort of human intervention whatsoever. A good example of this would be the coin NXT, one of the first truly decentralized trading platforms. For a rather steep fee, a user could create their own token that could interact with the NXT blockchain and then be trade-able with other custom-created tokens. NXT’s API functionality also allowed with NXT tokens to operate independently of the NXT blockchain, having special coded features that allowed for interaction with other software components. Such older DEXs like NXT and NEM still see some ICO-release activity, although the majority of that belongs to the much more programmer-intensive Ethereum.

While all of the above-named platform coins require the downloading of a software package in order to be a member of the coin “network” (similar to bitcoin), a number on unironically named “third party DEXs” have been springing up lately, which make use of the hands-off approach of letting the software run and the trades conduct themselves, yet are still hosted by a third-party website which may or may not go offline at any moment. One platform coin that issues its own tokens which has managed to mitigate this process is Counterparty (XCP), which makes use of multiple servers spread worldwide, to mitigate the possibility of downtime or a DDOS attack.

Regardless, a key point to remember is the fact that DEXs in general tend to suffer something of a liquidity problem, meaning they simply don’t have enough users, enough volume – enough “action” – to attract much outside appeal. As the general crypto user becomes more aware of their presence (the concept is hardly more than 4 years old), perhaps things will change in the future, but for now a lot of DEXs remain ghost towns. Here is a list of DEXs that have proven themselves as reliable within the short history of their invention:

OpenLedger – In short, a decentralized version of a crowdfunding program that makes the ICO process extremely easy, as well as easy to keep track of your various coins/tokens. Far more trafficked than most other competing DEXs.

Blocknet – Allows for the trading of one coin/token for another through “inter-blockchain technology,” meaning the software uses a layer of code that allows blockchain from different coins to “cross-talk.”

BitBay – Advertises itself as “the world’s first fully-functional decentralized marketplace,” allows user to place trade orders for just about any digital commodity for any other.

EtherDelta – For those looking to exclusively trade a huge number of ERC-20 compliant tokens (Ethereum-built tokens) against each other, this is the market for you. This website-based DEX offers hundreds of trading pairs (though only some have degree of activity) and conducts hundreds of ETH worth of trades on a daily basis.

Decentrex – Offers over 580 Ethereum token-based trading pairs; all trade-able against each other (as all DEXs are supposed to work). Open sourced, smart-contract based and user-trustworthy, Decentrex wins out over all other DEXs by conducting an astounding 10,000+ ETH in volume in a 24-hour time period.

VII. Where can I find a complete list of exchanges?

Although we admit that many worthy competitors indeed exist out there, us, the team at Coin Clarity, is on a mission to maintain the biggest active collection of cryptocurrency exchanges on the planet. Be assured we are working hard every gosh darn day to find and list every new or up-and-coming cryptocurrency exchange that offers any bit of legitimacy. Having said that, we take no responsibility for whatsoever funds loss(es) your may incur from your experience with these exchanges, and again, we strongly recommend extreme caution and a firm understanding how bitcoin works and of the transactions you are making, before you make them.

Here is our master list of all the exchanges we could possibly locate, and encompasses hundreds of hours worth of research (which is still ongoing). If you can’t find the coin you are looking for via looking through our exchanges list, we strongly recommend you use our coins search feature to find which exchanges sell the coin that way.