Bittrex vs Binance

B ittrex is getting more and more out of hand – the ongoing technical glitches, the missing support, the frozen wallets, the frozen account disaster, the missing smartphone app in addition to a crappy mobile view and as last – while the big NEO run mid of November – even a complete freeze of the most attractive market, at the time it was peaking. Sure, its selection of available coins is outstanding and the available trading volume is mostly good – but do we really have to swallow all these downsides? Is there no alternative to Bittrex, so to say a potential Bittrex Killer? With Bitfinex becoming the next MtGox we need a serious alternate platform, where we can trade safely AND convenient.
Well, there is one player on the market that gains more and more attention, the user base grows exponentially and the platform is quite OK. The talk is about the Binance exchange . The exchange was founded by an ICO, went live in July 2017 and has multiple unique features to offer. With the ICO you have purchased BNB tokens, which can be traded on Binance now. Furthermore holding them in your Binance account gives you some advantages, like cutting the low fees even more by factor 2, means a 50% discount on 1% fees. If you are into scalping for example, trading many trades for small profits, this can make a real difference for your overall profits. But more on that later.
Being an Chinese exchange (now operating from Japan, due to the missing governmental love for Cryptos in China) one can get a feeling being more in a Casino than a crypto exchange, there are lots of draws for prizes, trading competitions and things you can win, when using Binance as your exchange. Don’t worry, it might seem a bit fishy to you, though this is just due to the nature of the exchanges origin. By the moment of writing this, you can win iPhones and a world trip – if that isn’t something, huh?
Binance vs Bittrex – A comparison
Let’s get the facts straight and compare these two exchanges one by one. Let’s do a battle by points.
Signup, Verification & Support
Signup is fast on both sites. However, the tiered verification is much more clear and easier to handle on Binance. Bittrex locked down my account, as I created one before, which I obviously forgot. I had my account on enhanced level, but they decided to lock it down, as my second older account (which totally forgot) was not verified at all – so they wanted me to verify this as well to reset the limitations. This can be tough nut, when the support answers only every third day and requests humiliating things like “take a photo of you, holding your ID with a paper that shows Bittrex written on it” – feels a bit like a fiverr job. After 17 days the problem was solved by simply disabling the old account, but heck that support team didn’t make it easy.
On Binance you can with draw 2 BTC within 24 hours unverified (Level 1), on Level 2 you can withdraw 100 BTC within 24 hours, which should be enough for the most. Therefore you submit the usual documents. For Level 3 you have to be a real whale, as here the limits get lifted even more, though it needs you to contact Binance directly. Overall the verification process is super simple and most people won’t even need Level 2. For the support received, I can say I got always swift replies within 24 hours, mostly after 3-4 hours, depending on the time of the day. Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, Weibo, QQ all possibilities to reach the chat and get even faster help for your problems.

  BITTREX : 0 | BINANCE : 1

The Trading Fees
Bittrex are not notorious for super high fees, but still: 0.25% are 0.25% per transaction – and this can become significant over time.
Binance takes 0.1% which is a fivefold less than on Bittrex. It gets even better if you hold the BNB tokens in your account, as if you pay the fees with BNB instead of BTC you get a whopping 50% discount, making it 0.05% fees per transaction.

     BITTREX : 0 | BINANCE : 1

The Trading Platform
Bittrex trading platform is full little glitches, but somehow it always works. Sometimes the performance sucks and the charts mess up. As we described in our Bittrex Guide it is possible to have the awesome Tradingview charts on it, which helps a lot. A huge advantage Bittrex has against Binance here, is the conditional order feature. This is helpful as you don’t want to have your sell orders public all the time while the trade is running – everyone could buy your stop loss order and kick you out of the trade for example.
The Binance trading platform is ultra fast and is capable for processing 1,400,000 orders / second, which is insane. While trading there we had never a performance issue or problems to get our orders filled. Pending orders are possible, but are public on the order book, due to the missing conditional order feature. The advanced platform (they have a basic and a advanced one) offers more insight in the order book, which can help you getting a rough outlook what will happen on the charts. Those come with a load of indicators, running smoothly and are good to trade with. That being said, the UX could need an improvement – there are too many boxes scattered over the screen, which can make it hard for newbies to find their way. This is the main issue with Binance, you will likely need a few minutes on the platform to get everything how it works. Also a guided tour for newbies would be great addition and help the platform to gather more young traders.
A mess on both platforms is that you have to decide if you want to place a pending take profit or a stop loss order. One can’t have both at the same time. For newbies it will take some time on both exchanges to find their way, but we will soon release an Binance Guide, that makes things crystal clear, hopefully. Due to the lag issues of Bittrex and the UX issues of Binance this round ends as a draw, without a winner.
BINANCE has implemented a stop-loss / limit order feature. You can now setup a stop loss as well as a take profit – a great and long needed feature to Cryptoworld. Fantastic news!

       BITTREX : 0 | BINANCE : 1

Available Coins
New coins find their way hardly onto Bittrex. The application fee for new coins to get listed on Bittrex is 5K USD – that’S just for the consideration, without any guarantees. This makes it hard to get promising shooting stars with high demand like WTC aboard. Beside that, one has to admit that Bittrex has an impressive range of good coins available already. 269 trading pairs is enough to find you a good one or two to trade with. If you like to hop on the most fresh hype train coins, Bittrex won’t be for you in many cases, though. On Bittrex you can trade coins against BTC, ETH and USDT
Binance has also lots of coins to offer. For an exchange that has started in July 2017, 149 trading pairs are a lot. Binance is adding liberally and if there are high potential coins the community talks about, you can be sure to find them on Binance soon. However you will miss some important smaller ones from time to time, but we are sure Binance is working on this and will add them one by one. On Binance you can trade the coins against BTC, ETH, USDT and their own token BNB. Furthermore a big plus with Binance is that you get the GAS for the NEO you are holding there. Plus the withdrawal of NEO is free.

      BITTREX : 1 | BINANCE : 0

Trading Mobile
Oh Bittrex, what did you do? The responsive website of Bittrex is a mess, non functional navigation and a nightmare to navigate around. Bittrex has no official app available.
Binance, you did much better here! A fully functional app and a great responsive version of the website makes trading easy and comfortable, even if you are sitting in the forest. Great job.

    BITTREX : 0 | BINANCE : 1

And The Winner is…
Binance scores a tight 4:1 win against Bittrex in this comparison. Bittrex is slowly becoming a barely moving dinosaur. Sure – it is doubtless still the market leader, but it seems to be a frozen platform without any improvements, startsing slowly playing tricks on its traders. In the first paragraph I mentioned the frozen markets and wallets, once NEO was on fire. This happened just right now again, when I was writing this post with the huge MTL spike. This is not a good sign at all. The development of new features seems to be not existent, the lab section didn’t move a bit in the last months. Their main advantage over their competition is the wide range of coins they offer and the ease of use. The fees seem to be ridiculous against what you pay on Binance and the missing customer support is a punch in the face of loyal traders of this platform. Great that finally some competition starts to rock that boat. The Binance platform is rocket fast, just the UX needs a major makeover, especially if they want to gain more novice traders. Their marketing efforts are a nice gimmick, that makes it even more fun to trade and the customer support is outstanding.
Sure, we will keep our Bittrex accounts, but if the coins are available on Binance, we will use this platform first. Try it out yourself and have a look on the fees – compare your overall costs in fees per month between the both and you will be puzzled why you ever paid so much. Good luck for the future, Binance – we put our hats off for the work you did in these few months.