Review contents
Binance is one of the most established crypto and long-standing exchanges out there. It’s super popular, and for good reason – it has a huge range of cryptocurrencies to trade, very low fees, and a great trading platform. Overall, it’s 5 stars from us.
Binance is one of the largest and most popular advanced crypto trading platforms out there. It has over 120 million customers from across the world, trading billions of pounds worth of crypto every single day. It’s simply massive.
It started way back in 2017, which is very old for crypto, and quickly became one of the most popular exchanges, thanks to the awesome trading experience (we’ll cover that below).
And because of its size, it can charge some of the lowest fees out there. It also has one of the largest ranges of cryptocurrencies to trade, with over 350 to choose from.
Alongside crypto trading, it offers a wide range of additional services, such as staking (earning interest on crypto), an NFT marketplace (more on that later), financial services (such as debit cards and loans), and services for institutions (large companies), such as custody services (storing crypto safely for them). Plus lots more – they’ve even got their own blockchain (cryptocurrency network – more on that below).
Overall, it’s one of the go-to-places for crypto, and highly rated – with a rating of 4.6 out of 5 on the Apple store, and 4.5 out of 5 on the Google Play store – and that’s from a combined total of over 1 million reviews!
If you’ve heard enough already, learn more and get started on the Binance website¹ – you’ll also get $100 off trading fees. If not, we’ll cover Binance in detail below.
Note: we’ll use the terms crypto, cryptocurrency, cryptoasset, token and coin – they all mean the same thing, which is the cryptocurrency itself (e.g. bitcoin).
If Binance is for you, sign up with Nuts About Money to get $100 off fees.
Binance can be pretty complicated if you aren’t familiar with crypto or investing at all. It can all be a bit confusing to begin with, as you’re thrown into an advanced exchange view to buy and sell crypto (for instance, there’s price charts and lots of numbers displayed at once).
If you haven’t used an exchange before, we recommend starting with an easier platform, such as eToro¹ – where you can learn the basics of trading first, and get confident, before heading over to Binance when you’re more comfortable (if you want to).
However, if you are determined to start trading on an advanced platform, then by all means, give Binance a go, there's a good reason why it has such great reviews – just be prepared to learn!
There'll be lots of things you won’t be sure on to start with, but they do provide lots of learning resources and information to help you learn the basics, all covered in their ‘academy’, which is a series of lessons to teach you all about crypto, blockchains and trading.
The actual Binance trading platform is pretty awesome. In fact, it’s one of the best out there. It’s built for more advanced traders, and has pretty much everything you need to trade effectively – including a great chart showing real-time prices, the volume in the market (how many people trading) and the order book (current bids).
There’s also advanced trading tools, such as limit orders (setting your own price to buy and sell), and stop-loss and take-profit orders (automatically selling when the price hits a certain level). Plus, lots more trading tools and features.
Plus, you can easily navigate to other cryptocurrencies, without leaving the trading view (so it can be done on one screen). It’s all pretty great. Can you tell we're big fans? So big, we use it here at Nuts About Money, and recommend it to our friends and family too! Plus $100 off trading fees¹.
Note: there’s also historical data which you can download and use for testing your own trading strategies.
What's more, it works great on your mobile – with a dedicated app, and with all the same great trading features. You could simply trade on your phone without ever needing a computer (although having a large screen can certainly help).
If you’re looking for an exchange with a huge range of coins to trade, you’ve found it.
Binance has one of the widest range of cryptocurrencies to trade – currently over 350, and new ones are added all the time. If a big new token launches, Binance will be very quick to add it.
Of course, there's all the major coins such as bitcoin and ethereum (ether), and lots of the smaller altcoins too (alternative coins (alternative to bitcoin)). What’s great about binance is you can actually filter by some unique categories, for instance you can filter for projects that are women-led, or metaverse related, or gaming related. It’s pretty cool, and great for researching new tokens to trade.
Binance also runs its own blockchain (crypto network), which is called BNB chain, and has the native token BNB. So, on binance, you can buy and trade tokens on the BNB network too.
On Binance you can also trade leveraged tokens – and these are pretty interesting. Trading these means you can increase how much you are actually trading by as much as 4 times. Meaning, you can buy a token that represents 4x more than you would otherwise buy normally (called ‘spot’). E.g. If you want to trade 1 bitcoin, you could trade 4 bitcoin instead with a bitcoin leveraged token.
However, the amount of leverage is not constant, it fluctuates from around 1.25x to 4x, which is intended to increase your profits when the price is increasing and reduce your losses when the price is declining – it’s all pretty smart.
Leveraged tokens are good for more advanced traders in the UK, as you can’t trade derivatives (things linked to an asset) of cryptocurrencies, it’s banned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – the people who make sure financial firms are looking after customer’s money. That means you can’t trade anything related to the price of a cryptocurrency, you can only trade crypto tokens themselves.
If it wasn’t banned, a popular way of trading with more cash than you have (leverage), is trading Contract For Differences (CFDs), rather than the tokens themselves. We won’t cover this in detail now, but our guide to the best CFD trading platforms has more information if you’re interested.
There’s not a huge range of leveraged tokens, but there’s the most popular ones including bitcoin and ethereum, and new ones are being added occasionally. To view the full range, check out the Binance website¹.
Binance also has an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) marketplace, where you can buy and sell NFTs. NFTs can be anything stored on the blockchain (the crypto network, e.g. Binance chain). Typically this is art or collections of digital images, such as profile pictures, but can be anything.
You can also put your crypto to work, if you’re holding it for the long-term, and earn interest on your crypto (kind of like the interest you get if you store your money with a bank).
With Binance Earn, you can decide on a length of time where your crypto is deposited, for instance 30 days, 60 days or 90 days, or even a flexible time frame, and your crypto is locked away, in return for interest.
This is similar to staking your crypto, which you can also do with Binance, and this is where you are actually depositing your crypto to support the functioning of a blockchain (for instance Ethereum).
In order for ‘Proof of Stake’ (PoS) blockchains to run, they need lots of machines across the world to process transactions, and these are called validators. In return for processing transactions, validators earn crypto in return, as regular rewards.
And in order to run a proof of stake validator, you need to deposit crypto as insurance that you are going to process transactions in the right way, and if you don’t you’ll lose some of your crypto.
So, Binance runs lots of validator machines, and allows you to stake your crypto, and earn interest in return.
With Ethereum, expect to earn around 4-6% per year with Binance, and there’s a range of different staking options, called DeFi Staking (DeFi stands for decentralised finance), which you can view on the Binance website¹.
The great thing about Binance is it’s one of the cheapest crypto exchanges out there! There’s pretty much no fees for anything other than buying and selling, and a very small fee when withdrawing (unless you’re using additional services not related to trading).
So, you’ll pay a set transaction fee per trade, which doesn’t change depending on what cryptoasset you are trading (unlike some other exchanges) – we’ll cover the fees below.
With advanced exchanges, such as Binance, you’ll pay what’s called maker and taker fees…
Maker fees are where you place a trade and set the price (also called a limit order), and it benefits the exchange as you are adding orders (you are adding liquidity).
A taker fee is the opposite, and charged when you immediately buy or sell (called a market order) and so take orders from the exchange, removing liquidity, and so, usually these fees are higher.
With Binance, the fees reduce as your trading volume increases, measured in BUSD (Binance USD), which is the equivalent to US Dollars (Binance's USD stablecoin), and it also reduces if you hold the Binance token (BNB).
Here’s where the fees start (30 day trading volume):
< 1,000,000 BUSD (0 to 25 BNB)
Maker fee: 0.10%
Taker fee: 0.10%
< 1,000,000 BUSD (More than 25 BNB)
Maker fee: 0.09%
Taker fee: 0.10%
≥ 5,000,000 BUSD (More than 100 BNB)
Maker fee: 0.08%
Taker fee: 0.10%
So,for new customers, you’ll be paying 0.10% per trade – that’s very low. And this is just a summary of the starting pricing tiers – for high-rollers with bigger trading volume, these fees keep reducing all the way to 0.02%. We said the fees were low!
For comparison, if you were to trade with Coinbase, another large, very popular crypto exchange, fees start at 0.40% (maker) and 0.60% (taker), and reduce with more trading volume.
The customer support is great overall.
First, there’s a great help centre, which covers pretty much everything you’d ever have a problem with or want to ask a question about – with in-depth and detailed answers.
Then, there’s also live chat support, which runs 24/7. This is pretty great, and it’s a real person helping resolve your issues (not a computer). They’ll also email you if it’s going to take some time.
Binance is one of the leading crypto exchanges in the world – it’s absolutely huge and massively popular.
They store all of their customers’ money and crypto as 1:1 – that means, they don’t lend out or use customers' money for any reason, it’s simply held ready for customers to withdraw it if they want to. This is verified by regular audits, and everything is transparent with ‘proof of reserves’ updated on the Binance website¹.
However, Binance is not authorised and regulated in any particular country, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK.
This means Binance hasn't been checked and approved to look after your money, and it’s unlikely you’ll get any compensation if they go out of business.
Although as mentioned above, the full amount (100%) of customers’ money is stored safely and withdrawable at any time, and it doesn’t mean they don’t have very high standards and procedures in place to make sure your money is safe at all times – they do.
Note: this doesn’t mean you can’t lose your money trading – always use a sensible trading strategy.
In general customers rate Binance ‘OK’ – on the popular reviews website, Trustpilot, it’s got an overall rating of 2.1 out of 5. That’s pretty low in general, however, in finance and crypto, it’s not too bad.
Finance and crypto companies often get lots of bad reviews that bring the overall rating down as they need to be strict when it comes to verifying your identity, to protect your money and stop fraud – and that means you need to provide your identity documents, which some people don’t like doing, or run into issues when doing so and so can’t use the platform. Frustrated customers means 1 star reviews!
Apart from those negative reviews, there’s a lot of 5 star reviews from customers who do use the platform, and are happy with the overall experience, low fees and customer service.
As a recap, Binance is rated 4.6 out of 5 on the Apple store and 4.5 out of 5 on the Google Play store – from over 1 million reviews.
Here’s a quick recap and the pros and cons of Binance:
We’re big fans of Binance here at Nuts About Money. It’s got pretty much everything you’d want from a crypto exchange – a huge range of coins to trade (over 350), low fees (0.10%), and a great trading platform, with everything advanced traders need. Plus a great mobile app. It also offers staking (earning interest on your crypto), which is great for long-term investing.
All this combined has made it one of the largest and most popular crypto exchanges in the world.
Overall, we think it’s awesome, and it’s a big 5 stars from us. To learn more, or get started, head over to the Binance website¹ – you’ll also get $100 off trading fees.
Yep! And it’s a pretty good one.
Get $100 off your trading fees if you sign up with Nuts About Money. To claim, simply get started on the Binance website¹.
If Binance is for you, sign up with Nuts About Money to get $100 off fees.
If Binance is for you, sign up with Nuts About Money to get $100 off fees.
If Binance is for you, sign up with Nuts About Money to get $100 off fees.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
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If Binance is for you, sign up with Nuts About Money to get $100 off fees.
