Not to mention Coinbase is only a medium size player outside the US. Binance is the biggest exchange in the world. No one outside US uses Coinbase, it’s fees are ridiculous.
The latter is largely due to regulatory capture, US customers being banned from Asian exchanges due to US regulations. Almost nobody outside the US actually prefers Coinbase, the fees and liquidity is just much worse. The volumes on Binance speak for itself.
Coinbase operates under the protectionist policy of the US and still only has 1/10th of the volume that Binance has (with the same amount of employees). I never got what the fuss is about Coinbase compared to all exchanges, except for the "silicon valley bro" angle
This is sorta misleading. Coinbase absolutely dominates the US market as far as crypto goes, especially large retail accounts. Binance is mostly smaller trading worldwide (guys with $1000 speculating on shitcoins and such), not 5-7 figure US crypto accounts like with Coinbase.
Coinbase acts like this because it was founded from day one to serve the US market, and everything that it has done has been to invest millions of dollars a year into complying with US law. Coinbase has only in the past couple months, started expanding internationally so they don't die immediately in case the US regulatory system decides to cannibalize them.
Binance acts like this because complying with US law is ridiculously expensive. Binance cares most about serving the remaining 95% of humanity that does not live in the US. Maybe seven years or so ago they really started shifting things around so their US services are expendable, and could be jettisoned at any moment if US regulators start biting.
Both are entirely reasonable strategies, and it's why I, as a US citizen, moved everything I had in Binanace away 7 or so years ago, and only ever do anything custodial with Coinbase. Back in the before times, I had accounts across multiple global exchanges so I could run arbitrage bots etc, but now it's basically Coinbase or nothing when it comes to custodial exchanges.
It also illustrates the lack of competition due to US regulations preventing foreign exchanges (many of them signficiantly larger and cheaper than Coinbase) from serving US customers.
Very few people outside the US trade on Coinbase because they have monopoly margins.
I trust Coinbase a lot more than Binance. Their fees on the Coinbase Pro exchange are actually more reasonable than the simple user facing app Coinbase app that they push. Especially once you start reaching certain volumes (above 50M$), their fees for market makers drop to 0%. So those heavy traders aren't affected by fees.
And they are very well integrated and trusted within the US financial system.
From the casual attention I pay to this, I thought Coinbase was one of the, if not the, largest US exchange at this point. I'm surprised no one has even mentioned it here. Am I missing something?
Coinbase is really a pain to work with. I tried to open a business account for my i401k and eventually just gave up due to the same dual account issue. Even just a straight forward personal account started causing me issues. Every step in the process is so much more complicated than it needs to be. I switched to Binance US as my fiat to crypto on ramp and have had no issues so far. I have no idea if Binance US even supports business accounts though. Last time I properly used coinbase was years ago when they onboarded chainlink and there were massive arbitrage opportunities for several hours. Price on Coinbase was 25 - 45% higher on coinbase than other exchanges. I spent hours just buying chainlink on other exchanges, sending it to coinbase, selling it, sending those funds to the original exchange and repeat.
Coinbase is not for crypto people. It is for people who only care about hodling some crypto for profit and want an easy on-ramp. It is not for traders either as it is incredibly expensive to deposit and trade. I'd take Binance over Coinbase any day of the week. If I use Coinbase I pay 2% only for depositing which is insane. If I use Binance for example deposit is free, withdraw is 0.75 EUR and I pay 0.2% (note the zero) for transactions.
I still prefer Binance who are exposed to users via actual crypto (BNB) than Coinbase who are trying to eat the trad investors exposure and banking on their preferential treatment from US regulators.
Not to mention that Binance has 9x the volume, much much more crypto and is pro-competition and lists Coin on day 1 while CB wouldn't even consider listing BNB or anything by competitors.
Coinbase is mostly for a US audience, and crypto is generally less useful in countries with a relatively stable currency and banking system. It doesn’t really matter to crypto prices whether or not coinbase exists.
Coinbase is like an empty casino with lots of employees, a solid vault, and no one at the table games. Binance is like a packed casino with few employees and about as transparent as mud.
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