It seems that there is a wide variety of crypto exchanges on the scene now, and increasingly these exchanges are offering users the chance to become investors. If you don’t know why you should invest in a crypto exchange, maybe you need reminding that exchanges are at the forefront of this massive new investment/speculation vehicle. Taking profit on every investment or trade we place. Some exchanges are handling hundreds of millions of USD a day and we have the opportunity as investors to capture some of that.

Exchanges; The best crypto investments of 2018?

COSS.IO (The Crypto One Stop Solution)



COSS is my number one pick, it has to be the single most generous dividend paying exchange investment to date. Investing in COSS has historically been about seeing the potential of the project, past the mountains of coordinated FUD that surrounded it. The COSS token offers us a cut in the exchange revenue, 50% to be precise, forever. It’s approaching the end of it’s long beta run. I would guess that by Q2 2018 it will be a much more complete product. As it stands, all of the trading volume is organic and human. Once they release their API, bots will be trading and volume will 10x easily, meaning more revenue for every COSS token held. Very exciting times ahead for COSS. I bought COSS at and average of $0.10, it recently hit an all time high just under $3, before the January crash of which I am confident it will surpass again. Fiat pairs will also be coming to this exchange as it works toward complete compliance with the Singapore government, this is something that not many current exchanges offer and it will drastically increase the price of each token.

Traders get a fee reduction that increases with volume. Large volume traders (whales) get the lowest fees on the market (0.04%).

The COSS token nor the fee share are considered securities.

The fee share comes from all revenues, not just the exchange.

The community support that surrounds the project.

The team showing integrity in the face of grave mistakes (limit to market).

Useful links for you to find out more:

COSS has a very helpful reddit community, ask anything.

BLOCKPORT.IO* (Simple Crypto For The Masses)

Blockport* is a new entry, with a token sale fast approaching. It currently offers the easiest bounty system I have ever taken part in, which appears to be the motto of the entire project, keep it simple, bring crypto to the mainstream. This is actually what I tried to convince COSS developers to do on slack in the early days. Alas, they were under pressure from existing traders to develop their ‘advanced’ trading service and this is the direction they have focused on first. I am a strong believer that if an exchange is going to succeed it needs to compete with Coinbase on the front of simplicity and offer a complete, user-friendly service. This looks very promising for that purpose. If COSS looked this polished before ICO I would have had no hesitations investing heavily, I am very excited about this exchange. The downside is that Blockport doesn’t offer a fee split allocation like COSS does. But it’s token is used in a similar way to Binance (listed below), the most popular exchange with a native token associated with it. Both Blockport and Binance use their tokens to reduce trading fees, however Blockport’s token will have an additional use, you can pay with it to follow the trades of professional traders. You can set how much of your portfolio with follow each person. Or if you are a great trader yourself, you can be paid in their token to perform trades.

Useful links for you to find out more:

Blockport bounty* edit: please note that the community bounty is now closed – no more bounty points will be awarded. I urge you however, to get yourself whitelisted for the token sale coming soon!

*These links contains my Blockport referral code, to help Blockport identify my involvement with their bounty program (which has now ended). The is a free blog that doesn’t otherwise pay me to review these projects. I still offer my referral link for you to find the project but no more bounty points will be issued to myself of anyone that clicks.



What exchanges should I be wary of?



disclaimer; this is in regards to investing in the exchange, not its usability. The exchanges listed below are decent enough to trade on.

I don’t mean that you shouldn’t use cryptopia but I do mean that you should be cautious of anyone recommending that you buy its DOT coin. DOT may or may not turn out to be a good speculative investment, I am not claiming that is has no value, however, it does have very little utility as an investment in an exchange. DOT has been used to get coins listed on the exchange and to buy very small currencies, ones which are so cheap that it didn’t make sense to use traditional crypto pairs. In an investment enviroment, already saturated with speculation and hope, DOT is too speculative for me even remotely recommend anyone look at.

CEFS are cryptopia’s version of a fee split similar to COSS. Please be aware of that.

KUCOIN.COM

Kucoin is a decent enough exchange and started off, in the eyes of some, as a great investment compared to COSS. It took off fast, dominated the social media world and was one of the first exchanges that I am aware of to offer NEO pairs and it even pays GAS for any NEO held (which scores it huge bonus points). Even more impressively, holding KCS on the exchange paid out dividends DAILY, compared to COSS doing so weekly. The only downside with KCS was that it had never mentioned the profit share percentages lasting forever and infact, has recently dropped the fee share from 50% to 15%. Something else Kucoin did that I took as a red flag early on… forcing 2FA on all users and stopping earning until they logged in and activated it. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? Well no one was told, many logged in a month or so later to find they hadn’t been getting their fees. On the plus side, the value of the coin shot up, even if it did drop again after news of the fee split fading in strength.

A more recent note of caution for Kucoin investors comes from the news that they are removing their referral system without prior notice. This is a deviation from their whitepaper and has resulted in a reduced confidence in the projects integrity.

The most successful exchange coin to date, doesn’t pay any kind of dividends for holding.

BINANCE.COM

Is it truly important that an exchange pay you dividends in order to make a good return? The Binance token, BNB, offers no such dividend yet the exchange is the most popular among traders at the time of writing and BNB is the higest ranking ERC (ether) token, not bad for a humble exchange token with a relatively small function and no dividend options. Whats more is that the BNB token is still steadily increasing in value. Its success, I believe is because Binance has focused on being a great exchange, first and foremost. It is through analyzing the strength of an exchange like this that I see the potential for the new Blockport* token to increase in a very similar manner to this one. Blockport will be excellent for bringing in new investors to the scene and Binance does an excellent job of servicing the more experienced traders. BNB being a high volume trading pair with the biggest exchange behind it makes it arguably the ‘safest’ exchange coin to invest in, even though it’s already grown considerably, there is still room to grow. BNB is also the highest ranked ECR (ether) token.

This article has been written from my own experiences, views and research and has been verified with other investors and edited where needed. If you spot anything that you disagree with or hold opposing evidence, please get in touch!