This is one of the biggest issues
in all of crypto right now.
And this research report tells us
We've been working on this report for a while now
because there's no one source
that gives the full picture.
In many cases, data here had to be collected
by manually reading the terms and conditions
on more than 50 exchanges,
something I wouldn't wish to my worst enemy.
But the work is done and I have the answers.
First, we need to find two major types of fees:
When you make a trade on an exchange,
you're either placed in one of two categories.
You're either a maker or you're a taker, and this matters
because taker fees can be as much as
than maker fees for your buy or sell order.
So let's say you're selling $10,000 in crypto.
This can be the difference between
To understand why this is, it's best
to think about what exchanges want.
They want liquidity, that precious liquidity.
They want more assets on their order books
because this is the product on their shelves,
Liquidity.
If no one is placing their assets on the order book,
the exchange can't make any money.
So a maker is making the order book,
they are adding liquidity to it.
A taker is taking from the order book.
They are reducing the liquidity available,
meaning the exchange has less to sell later.
So this makes sense.
Many exchanges charge less for maker fees
because you're helping them keep their
proverbial shelves stocks.
Now, what determines if your buy or sell order
gets labeled as maker or taker?
Typically, this comes down to timing.
If you place an order and it's executed immediately,
you're usually going to be considered a taker.
A market order is always a taker
because you're effectively making an order that says,
Hey, I want to buy or sell this asset immediately at the current rate.
Thank you very much.
So you're always taking from the top of the order book.
To understand this further, let's take a
look at this order book for Bitcoin.
Sell orders are in red and buy orders are in green.
The current price is $46,500.
This is the equilibrium between buy and
sell orders or supply and demand.
Shout out to Alfred Marshall.
If we come in and place a buy order right at $46,500,
our order will be filled immediately
and will be considered a taker because
we're taking liquidity from the top of the order book.
On the other hand, if we were to place a
buy limit order at $46,400, it would be placed
down the list on the green side
where the order will wait until it's filled.
If and when it gets filled, we will have the lower maker fees.
This is because we're adding liquidity
to the order book, helping out the exchange
until the order gets filled.
So the moral of the story is you can often save
money on trades right out the gate by simply
using a limit order at a price that isn't executed right away.
Now let's take a look at these charts that I've made
comparing the top crypto exchanges and their fees.
There are five major fees that you should
take into consideration and two exceptions
that can actually lower these fees in many cases.
Of course, first, we have maker and taker fees
that we just discussed.
We can see on these seven exchanges,
the fees range between 0.01% for BitMEX, which is
next to nothing up to 0.35% for Bittrex.
I know they sound very similar.
You'll also notice that for some of these,
the maker and taker fees are the exact same.
For others like BitMEX, the taker fee is
five times higher than the maker fee,
so it's important to look at the fine details here.
And then we have spread fees.
None of these seven have spread fees,
but in most cases, if you see a spread fee,
this means there's likely no maker or taker fees
because the spread is simply another way
to charge transaction fees.
However, a few do charge both.
So again, always look at the fine print.
So let's say in exchange has a 0.5% spread fee.
If you want to purchase one Bitcoin at $45,000,
your actual purchase amount would be $45,225
$45,000 for the Bitcoin and $225 in spread fees.
Then we have deposit fees and withdrawal fees.
Most exchanges charge no fees to make deposits.
Anything with a red X here has no deposit fees.
You can see Binance and Bitfinex have fees for select
types of currency deposits, but in most cases no fees
and BitMEX has fees only for USDT deposits.
Generally, deposit fees aren't a concern.
You don't really have to worry about them.
Withdrawal fees, on the other hand,
that's a totally different story.
Just about every exchange has this,
which makes sense if you think about incentives,
they want to create a disincentive for you to
take your money off of their platform.
So the fees are higher there.
Moving to the next slide, let's talk about fee discounts.
Many exchanges have their own token,
and they offer discounts on trading fees
to users who hold that token.
We can see that crypto.com has
fairly high maker and taker fees.
However, you can potentially wipe away
all of those hefty fees by simply holding their token.
But if you look at the fine print,
in order to get 0% trading fees,
you have to stake 50 million CRO tokens.
That's about $25 million at current rates.
I don't know about you, but I don't have $25 million
sitting around to go ahead and try
to save $100 on transaction fees.
If you stake 5000 CRO tokens or about $2,500 worth,
you'll get 10% off trading fees.
So just make sure you always check that fine print.
Then many exchanges will have a volume discount.
Again though, to really reap the benefits here,
you need to be a bit of a baller
or you need to have like your entire extended family
trade on the same account.
Which seems like a terrible idea.
You can see FTX's volume discounts.
They're quite high.
You have to be a bit of a baller, but they're really not that
bad when you consider FTX has
some of the lower fees in town already.
Looking at transaction fees,
here we can see eToro has a spread that we talked about earlier,
a pretty hefty one and you can't buy ADA there anyways.
Coinbase's fees are definitely on the high side
but nowhere near Coinmama,
which absolutely knocked everyone else out of the park at 3.9%.
Here's another seven to look at,
straight away you'll notice BlockFi has
0% maker and 0% taker fees.
Here, I have to do an obligatory plug because
you can use the link in the description for BlockFi to get up to
$250 in Bitcoin for joining
and they offer interest on crypto and stablecoins
as well as a crypto credit card that pays you cash back in Bitcoin.
Now I will say, with the fees on BlockFi, 0% is amazing.
However, they don't have the largest selection
of cryptos in the entire world.
You'll find the big popular cryptos there,
but you're not going to find the tiny little
altcoins on that platform.
You'll also notice here that BTC markets
has a negative maker fee.
This means you actually make money
by trading on this site as a maker.
This isn't limited to BTC markets.
However, you'll typically only see negative fees
when combining something like a volume discount
on top of normal trading fees,
not just their flat based fee like this.
So that's pretty awesome.
That's an awesome feature.
Moving on from here, you'll notice Gemini's fees are quite high.
high and you'll also notice HitBTC is on the
very, very low end for fees.
And we also have some significant volume and
token discounts here as well.
Two more pages left.
Here you can see Luno and Liquid have 0% maker fees.
PancakeSwap, despite being a decentralized exchange,
has higher fees than many of its centralized brethren at 0.2%.
Kucoin is at 0.1% maker and taker fees.
I actually use Kucoin for most of my personal trading because
I take a few other factors into consideration
beyond just trading fees.
I like having a platform with a ton of options.
Kucoin has over 540 cryptos currently and
I like being able to do bots and lend and
buy cryptos all in the same site and they're good for all of that.
What Kucoin isn't the best about is for staking.
Their staking rates are not great,
but overall my experience has been pretty darn good.
River Financial is a bit different with flat fees of $1.49.
This can be good if you're a high volume trader,
but they also have a spread fee on top of this
that could eat into those savings.
In fact, five of these seven have some form of spread fee.
Something I want to point out about Robinhood,
which also goes for Square, PayPal and Weeble
is they are not the best places to buy crypto.
I'm ruining some future potential sponsorships here,
but this is important.
In fact, one of these platforms, I'm not going to say which
offered me a five digit sponsorship in the past
to talk about their crypto services, which
I had to turn down for this exact reason.
If you're looking to be more serious
about crypto or you plan to in the future,
don't start with one of these platforms.
The problem is once you are ready to
spread your crypto wings and
and go a little bit deeper into this space,
you'll find that you can't transfer your coins
off these exchanges because you don't
actually own the crypto keys,
meaning you'll have to sell, which is a taxable event
and then buy back in on a legit crypto exchange.
Now, some of these platforms plan to allow
for actual crypto wallets in the future,
but this hasn't been fully implemented just yet.
And now that we've done an overview, let's cover
who is the best of the best.
For the top ten list here,
we're considering the platform fees
before any token or volume discount.
So these are the base fees for all of the platforms.
Here are the top ten options for taker fees.
We can see BlockFi comes first,
followed by BitMEX with extremely low fees
of 0.05%, FTX at 0.07%, HitBTC at 0.09%,
and a several way tie at 0.1% taker fees.
For maker fees, and remember these are
always going to be lower on average.
We have BTC markets with a -0.05% fee
followed by a three way tie at 0% between
BlockFi, Liquid and Luno.
BitMEX and FTX are close behind,
followed by dYdX Okex and HitBTC.
This is like a tongue twister.
And then we have another several way tie at 0.1%.
So where does this leave us?
I think fees are only one piece of the equation when
picking the best exchange for you.
So because of this, I think any exchange
with maker and taker fees at or below
0.1% is a great starting point.
This gives you around 15 major exchanges to choose from.
From there, you need to ask yourself
some personal questions.
You need to do some soul searching to figure out
what you'd like to see in an exchange besides
just low fees, maybe you want a large variety of coins.
FTX or Kucoin are great for this.
Or maybe you want advanced trading features.
FTX or BTC markets are literally built for this.
Possibly your focus is lending out cryptos.
Here I would have to give it to BlockFi for usability
and Kucoin for the best yields.
Perhaps staking features matter most.
To be honest here, none of these are amazing for staking,
but Binance is probably the best out of all of these options.
So use this list of low trading fee platforms
as a jumping off point to find the exchange
that best suits your needs.
I'll have the few that I personally use
linked in the description of this video.
From here, I would recommend you check out
this video of mine for tactics on how to make passive income
with NFTs, an absolutely fascinating topic.
I would like to thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a profitable day!