Bittrex vs Binance vs Kyber vs Faast

Whether you’re new to the game or a veteran cryptocurrency investor, it happens all the time: just when you think your portfolio is perfect, an amazing project you’ve never heard of catches your eye, and you know you’ve got to get some fast. Unfortunately, the coins you’re willing to trade for it might not be so easy to trade with.

Let’s say we want to trade $100 worth of Aragon (ANT) for Aeternity (AE).

The question you should ask yourself with this or any other trade is simple: “How can I get the cryptocurrency I want while also paying lowest amount in fees?”

Let’s compare 3 different approaches to trading ANT for AE and see which one will leave us with the most AE (valued in USD) at the end of the day. For each of the three, you can click on the links in the various steps of the transaction process that will show you the records on etherscan.io for these transactions.

Centralized Exchanges: Binance & Bittrex

First, lets try some centralized exchanges. The largest one right now is Binance, so we’ll start there. While Binance does list many different tokens, there’s one little problem- it doesn’t support ANT, so we will also need an account on Bittrex, the largest exchange that does list ANT at the moment. While these two exchanges are competitors, in many situations like this, users can be forced to use both together. Assuming you’ve already completed the somewhat laborious process of creating accounts on Binance and Bittrex, we are ready to trade.

At the time of writing, CoinMarketCap lists ANT at $1.80 USD, which means we’ll be trading approximately 55.56 ANT. AE is currently listed at $2.00. With that in mind, let’s go through the whole process and crunch the numbers to see how much we’ll end up paying in fees.

Deposit ANT to Bittrex (Gas cost, 0.000213026, or $0.11)

Trade ANT for BTC (Receive 0.01330621 BTC after trade fees)

Withdraw BTC to Binance (0.0005 BTC withdraw fee, or $3.65)

Buy AE with BTC (Receive 46.6 AE for 0.01280621 BTC after trade fees)

Withdraw AE to our Wallet (1.6 AE Fee)

Final AE Balance: 45

Final Balance: $89.91 (45AE * $2.00 -$0.11 gas)

So, after all the effort to create accounts, place trades, and move funds across exchanges, we only ended up with $89.91(!) in AE.

Do you like paying over 10% in fees? Yeah, me neither.

Let’s try a popular alternative to centralized exchanges- Kyber Network.

Semi-Decentralized Exchange: Kyber Network

While Kyber does support AE, it has a limited selection of tokens, and ANT is not one of them. We will need to sell our ANT for ETH first to be able to trade on Kyber. Let’s see how the numbers break down:

Deposit ANT to Bittrex (Gas cost, 0.000213026, or $0.11)

Trade ANT for ETH (Receive 0.19179431 ETH after trade fees)

Withdraw ETH to Binance (0.006 ETH withdraw fee, or $3.02)

Swap 0.18579431 ETH to 45.66425169 AE (Gas cost 0.000878135, or $0.44)

Final AE Balance: 45.66

Final Balance: $90.79 (45.66AE * $2.00 -$0.11-$0.44 gas)

Okay- we saved 88 cents. We’re going in the right direction, but can we do better?

Instant Exchange: faa.st

Finally, lets give Faast a try. Faast is a semi-decentralized exchange which uses instant swaps, and doesn’t require accounts. It allows you to swap 100+ cryptocurrencies, make cross-chain trades, or even make multiple swaps at once, all straight from your own hardware or software wallet.

With all that in mind, let’s see what story the numbers tell:

Send ANT to Faast (Gas cost, 0.000213026, or $0.11)

Receive 47.95359375 AE

Final Balance: $95.80 (47.95 * $2.00 — $0.11 gas)

When you add up the total fees, Faast comes ends up being the cheapest at $4.20.

Overall

Each exchange type has its pros and cons. Centralized exchanges do offer deep liquidity and efficient spreads, but charge extremely high withdrawal fees. Exchanges like Kyber offer lower withdrawal fees, but have very little liquidity and large spreads, as well as higher gas costs, which can be expensive at times of high network load.

Faast offers you the best of both worlds. Terrific pricing, low withdraw costs and a wide selection of coins to choose from.

Building a strong, diversified crypto portfolio has never been this simple.

Further reading: Which is the Best Instant Exchange? Faast VS ShapeShift.io VS Kyber Network VS Bancor

—