Binance vs Poloniex
Crypto Exchange Comparison

Binance vs Poloniex – How It All Started?

Binance

Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange available. It’s ideal for first-time cryptocurrency buyers who want to avoid the competition and difficulty of smaller exchanges with lower liquidity to enter the crypto market and make their first investment. 

This giant Chinese fintech company founded by Changpeng Zhao leads the crypto-pack in every major category, including trading features, payment choices, market cap, trading volume, number of registered users, and support for fiat and cryptocurrencies.

Moreover, you can engage in P2P trading, staking, various investment strategies, effortless crypto exchanges or more advanced trading strategies, including futures trading and margin trading with up to 125 x leverage. The platform also offers very low trading fees compared to its rivals, enabling you to make the best of every deal. 

Finally, the Binance exchange allows users to make transactions anonymously, making it a good choice for people who prefer to keep their identities hidden.

Poloniex

Poloniex is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) established in January 2014, with headquarters in Delaware, United States. It was founded by Tristan D’Agosta, a musician who co-founded the Polonius Sheet Music media company in 2010.

In March 2014, shortly after the launch of Poloniex, the company was the subject of a hacking attack in which it lost around 12.3% of its Bitcoin holdings, roughly the equivalent of 50,000 USD in those days. Following this event, the exchange’s administration came clean about the incident and offered to fully reimburse its affected users for the 97 looted bitcoins using funds from D’Agosta’s earnings.

Despite the rocky beginning that resulted in a temporary fee hike, Poloniex gained attention in 2016 when it became the first trading platform to list Ethereum Classic (ETC). After the Ethereum Merge in September 2022, Poloniex is also ready to embrace the Ethereum hard forks that would potentially occur after this massive blockchain upgrade. 

By embracing ETC and the future hard forks branching out of the Ethereum blockchain, Poloniex’s popularity gained momentum and got back on the upward track. 

Binance vs Poloniex: The Cryptocurrency Exchanges Comparison 

Comparing and contrasting two marketplaces is the quickest and most effective way to analyse them and gain an understanding of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Let’s get started. 

Opening an Account

To join Binance, you must be 18 or older. You also need to be situated in a country where the platform can legally provide financial services. If you meet these criteria, then you are eligible to open a trading account on Binance.

The Binance mobile app and the Binance desktop client both make it easy for you to sign up for a Binance account by providing just a valid phone number or email address. The identity authentication process on Binance is entirely voluntary. However, completing it enables you to raise the daily fiat withdrawal and deposit quotas.

The entire process of verifying your identity with a selfie, government-issued ID, and account confirmation takes no more than a few minutes. The next step is depositing money to your trading account to start plotting your course of action on the crypto market.

Returning to Poloniex now. During the Poloniex account registration procedure, all that is required of you is to supply a valid email address. After that, you can instantly begin trading cryptocurrencies through this uncomplicated platform. Since the exchange does not follow Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, you do not have to disclose personal information. 

As soon as you’ve signed up, you can begin trading and depositing crypto into your account through the Wallet function, which also acts as a hub for managing your cryptocurrency holdings.

Main Features

If you’re hunting for a trading platform, I do not doubt that you’ll find what you’re looking for in Binance, as it offers the widest variety of trading options in the business. Namely, Binance offers many advanced features geared at experienced traders, yet it’s also a fantastic spot for cryptocurrency trading enthusiasts to enter the market in a streamlined and effortless way. 

But there’s Poloniex on the other side of the comparison. In the world of cryptocurrency, Poloniex is a tried-and-true option. It’s a traditional marketplace for trading digital assets between buyers and sellers. In this regard, Poloniex hosts several markets that can accommodate traders with varying degrees of expertise. To get started, use the beginner-friendly buy/sell option, while seasoned pros can go straight to the platform’s exchange for real-time trading operations.

This cryptocurrency exchange is a site where you can buy, sell, borrow, and lend a wide variety of cryptocurrencies, as well as participate in margin trading, establish stop-limit or spot trading orders, trade coins with futures contracts, and make use of the exchange’s APIs. 

Supported Cryptocurrencies

If you’re evaluating the number of different digital currencies Binance trades, you’ll easily see that it’s the largest exchange out there. In addition to Bitcoin, this international cryptocurrency exchange offers more than 600 alternative currencies, stablecoins, tokens, and digital assets. In other words, the amount of available trade pairs on this exchange is unparalleled.

You can also buy and sell a wide variety of cryptocurrencies on Poloniex, including the likes of Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), Ios (IOS), Ripple (XRP), Tether (USDT), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Tron (TRX), Litecoin (LTC), USD Coin (USDC), USDT-ERC20, and Monero (XMR). However, this exchange’s number of supported coins is nowhere near the number of listed digital assets on Binance. 

One way or another, it is vital that you verify the availability of any cryptocurrency projects featured on Poloniex before venturing into the trade through the exchange, as they may not be accessible due to inconsistencies in regulatory standards between different countries.

Payment Methods

When it comes to payment options, you can use any of the tradable cryptocurrencies on Binance to fund your account. The platform accepts diverse digital currencies as funding sources for trader accounts.

The main benefit of funding your Binance account with crypto is that you can avoid disclosing personal information during the registration procedure if your daily trading volume is under 2 BTC.

Despite this perk, remember that you’ll must to go through a Know Your Customer (KYC) protocol if you want to fund your Binance trading account using a debit/credit card or bank transfer.

With the help of a third-party payment provider like Simplex, which provides your payments in EUR, Poloniex is now able to accept all major credit and debit cards when you decide to make a crypto purchase through the platform. It is important to highlight the fact that this particular exchange does not accept deposits in the form of fiat currency due to its unregulated status. This restriction can make trading conditions more challenging for newcomers who have yet to purchase their first digital coins. 

Trading Fees and Limits

When calculating your trading fees on Binance, the platform takes into account your daily Binance Coin (BNB) balance and 30-day trading volume. In most cases, the transaction charge for buying or selling cryptocurrency is 0.5%, and the spot trading fee is 0.1%. In addition to these fees, you may be subject to other costs, such as withdrawal fees or charges incurred by using a particular deposit method. 

As evident, Binance offers competitively low costs. Additionally, by keeping BNB tokens in your wallet, you can take advantage of the significantly lower maker fee/taker fees (as little as 0.000% and 0.0517%, respectively) and retain a bigger portion of your earnings.

Now, let’s look at how Poloniex handles this single segment. For starters, Poloniex employs a maker-taker fee structure, as opposed to the flat fee scheme. The company argues that this method promotes high levels of liquidity (i.e. the ease with which one asset can be exchanged for another).

Generally, the fees on Poloniex are transaction-based, meaning that traders pay every time they make a trade. As your 30-day trading volume increases, you will move up to the following fee tier, thus decreasing the maker/taker fee.

How Safe Are Binance and Poloniex?

Binance and Poloniex appear to be the ideal trading platforms for any trader, given that they offer a significant number of cryptocurrencies and a profusion of trading choices when viewed from the perspective of a first-time visitor. Since they are not subject to oversight by any governmental financial bodies, these two exchanges can provide traders with a significant degree of leverage to use in their trades.

Despite the distinctive history of security breaches and regulatory concerns associated with both Binance and Poloniex, these two exchanges pack some of the best security measures within their platforms’ architecture, including SSL encryption, 2FA protocol, cold storage for the deposited funds, and more. 

Moreover, a staggering number of traders don’t appear to be bothered by these concerns, notably on Binance, which currently has around 30 million daily users.

Customer Support

We now enter a zone where, frankly, neither Binance nor Poloniex excels. Both platforms have comprehensive Help sections, along with insightful articles and FAQs that will help you learn the ins and outs of the exchange and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole.

However, it appears that getting in touch with a professional from Binance or Poloniex support could be a bit too slow, based on the collective accounts of the Binance and Poloniex clients shared on Trustpilot. So, maybe you could try your luck and reach them through some of their social media outlets for a quicker response rather than waiting for that return mail to arrive for days. 

Mobile Trading

The Binance app, as far as I can tell, operates as a centralized crypto trading hub you can easily use on the go. The app offers a diverse selection of cryptocurrency and fiat currencies for trading, simple trading instruments that enable you to generate additional passive income on top of your trading profits, crypto loan applications, and many more financial services.

In my opinion, the ever-growing number of crypto exchanges can occasionally present newbies to the sector with a somewhat daunting learning curve that can be challenging to navigate. This is why Binance created Binance Lite, a simplified version of the Binance App.

You can also easily trade on Poloniex from the convenience of your mobile browser. Still, the company additionally offers a mobile app for iOS and Android that gives you even more flexibility on the go. The app gives you quick and straightforward access to the order book, infographics, market trend analysis, and your recent transactions. 

Finally, both of these mobile applications are free to download and can be used on devices powered by the Android and iOS operating systems.

Binance and Poloniex vs Other Crypto Exchanges

If you can’t decide between Binance and Poloniex, I have a couple of more recommendations and trading platforms to offer.

Kraken

If I tell you that Kraken is the ultimate security fortress in the crypto industry, I bet you can already see where this is going, provided you carefully read the security section of this article. 

Kraken, which has been lauded for its human security and superior client support, guarantees its users a risk-free environment to invest in cryptos. Moreover, Kraken is the only cryptocurrency exchange that has never been compromised, in contrast to the unregulated Binance and Poloniex. 

If safety is the most important factor to consider when choosing a platform to trade cryptocurrencies, Gemini is yet another good choice you can make in this regard.

Coinbase

Right off the bat, I’d like to point out that compared to Binance and Poloniex, Coinbase has significantly higher trading costs. Despite its higher costs, Coinbase is a great place to start trading cryptocurrencies because it caters to beginners. 

At the same time, exchanges like Poloniex and Binance focus more on experienced traders and deal with some of the most volatile products.

Therefore, if you belong among novice traders, it may be wise to pay a little more for a globally famous service renowned for its ease of use and streamlined trade executions.

Conclusion

When comparing cryptocurrency exchanges, price to value is a crucial factor to consider because it reveals whether or not the company provides appropriate quality for the money. Binance is a better option than Poloniex in this scenario due to its lower trading costs.

Ultimately, Binance is the virtual cryptocurrency paradise for any trader in the world because it backs more cryptocurrency projects than any other exchange. Indeed, a vast selection of cryptocurrencies does not necessarily indicate a poor cryptocurrency exchange. Nonetheless, some investors appreciate being spoiled for choice, and Binance delivers cryptos and trading options in spades.

Sign Up with Binance

OR

Sign Up with Poloniex