Today we’re exploring the best Binance alternatives for 2024! Maybe you’re in the USA and so simply can’t use them or maybe you’re just sick of their legal troubles, invasive KYC practices or their woeful customer support.
Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got a number of fantastic alternatives to Binance that are not only cheaper, but are properly decentralized, are safer and have a more user-friendly interface for your trading needs. Whether you’re a novice trader or an experienced investor, our alternatives will provide you with the insights you need to make an informed decision.
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Top Binance Alternatives Right Now
We’ve included Binance in the list above just to show how utterly destroyed it gets by our recommended alternatives. Whether it’s privacy, security measures or just plain Taker / Maker fees that you’re concerned about, it’s pretty clear it’s no where near the best cryptocurrency exchange. Now let’s dive a bit deeper into each of them.
RoboSats – Best For Small, Fast Trades With Low Fees
RoboSats (Tor Link) is a brand new P2P exchange that only allows buying and selling Bitcoin with fiat over the Lightning Network. It gets almost top marks as it aces all our tests besides the Centralized / Decentralized one. While it is currently not decentralized, it has future plans for Federation and doesn’t require KYC info.
RoboSats allows you to use your own self custody wallet, works if that wallet is connected to your own Full Node and is set to work over Tor by default. It further protects your security and privacy by not only requiring no personal information, but by also randomly generating a new and fun robot account each and every trade.
With a wide array of supported currencies and payment methods, it works great in many countries plus ensures your sats arrive instantly by using the Lightning Network. You can also host your own copy of it on Node OS’s like Umbrel and it’s entirely open source.
For more info check out our step-by-step guide on How To Buy Bitcoins Using RoboSats.
Bisq – Best For Security & Large Trades
Bisq is an exceptionally well developed and decentralized P2P exchange that takes the form of an application rather than a websites you visit. Available on Windows, macOS and Linux, you simply download the program, verify its files and run it.
From there it will automatically generate a self custody wallet and randomized user profile for you. This means no personal information is required to trade and with a thriving market – especially in USA and Europe – you can easily buy up to 0.2 BTC per transaction with dozens of payment methods.
Bisq allows you to connect it to your own Full Node and by default works over the Tor network to ensure your privacy and security is as safe as possible. As it’s an application you personally run, you have complete control over all data and settings.
The downside of it being an application you run on your PC is that in order to accept and offer trades, that PC has to be on. This also means there’s a bit more setup initially for the user to do, however it’s no harder than installing any other piece of software out there.
Unique to Bisq is also how the program is governed and developed. It’s not only completely open source, but you can be paid to help develop it via the trading fees that Bisq collects. Users can also vote on decisions about the exchanges future through their DAO.
For more info check out our step-by-step guide on How To Buy Bitcoins On Bisq.
Hodl Hodl – Best For Beginners (Outside USA)
Hodl Hodl is a P2P, centralized exchange that has so many different payment methods, they even support buying Bitcoin with a Tesla! Beyond their huge variety of payment methods they also have an excellent user interface, are available in over 100 countries and fully support self custody wallets with no KYC.
Being around for almost a decade now, Hodl Hodl falls down a bit with quite high Maker and Taker fees and some of their privacy and security decisions. However they have a fantastic website that’s bright, fun and extremely well designed.
While many exchanges bombard their users with complex trading interfaces, they instead reduce everything to a simple search and filtering system. This allows you to sort through their huge order book and find exactly the order you want. From payment method to currency to how much you want to buy or sell, there’s clear and simple fields for everything.
While there is no KYC verification required, they do still require you to create an account and give them an email address. Beyond this, they also don’t allow usage of their website via Tor and don’t use E2EE or open source any of their code.
Peach Bitcoin – Best User Friendly Interface
Peach Bitcoin is a P2P, centralized exchange that allows virtually anyone, even complete beginners, to stack sats in a safe and private way. Making something safe and private usually means making it much more complicated and harder to use, so when we did our Peach Bitcoin review we were very impressed to see just how simple and straight forward it was. It has a simple and fun user interface that basically anyone should be able to pick up and use.
Starting out as a plucky Telegram group as recently as 2021, Peach the company was created in 2022 by @proofofsteph and has since launched their iOS and Android app to make P2P stacking the standard. Their goal is to make it possible for your grandma, your mum, your daughter and your granddaughter to easily and quickly stack sats P2P.
A big pain point we often hear from many Bitcoiners is that peer to peer exchanges are “harder to use” or have more complex interfaces which can be a fair point depending on what exchange you’re using.
Peach Bitcoin on the other hand bucks all these trends as they’re non-KYC, only allow users to hold funds in their own self custody wallets all while being peer to peer. This means that anyone, no matter how little they know about Bitcoin, can get straight into buying their first bitcoins all while ensuring they do so safely and privately.
Benefits Of Binance
The Biggest Cryptocurrency Exchange
There’s no denying it, Binance is the biggest global crypto exchange out there, at least by traded volume anyway. According to their home page around 245 million users “trust” them (rookie mistake really) and with this scale comes huge liquidity, huge profits and thus, a huge budget to build out features or to be available in places that other competitors can’t.
The liquidity point is a big plus on their side as it’s often a sore spot for other Binance alternatives that they simply don’t have enough buyers or sellers at the right price points available. Even if you only look at Bitcoin trading like we do, there’s still an almost endless amount of options out there.
Maybe you want to do a bank transfer, use Google Pay or Apple Pay, trade using digital currencies or other digital assets. Maybe you prefer using your credit or debit card to buy your bitcoin. All of these options require their own group of buyers and sellers to work together. Then there’s all the different banks, countries and payment methods out there. As Binance are so large, they’ve got a huge amount of these trading options open and setup ready to go as well as massive pools of buyers and sellers.
The result is no matter what specific type of trade you want to do, say buying Bitcoin using bank transfers in Brazil with a certain local Brazilian bank ABC, chances are they’ll have liquidity to get you a great exchange rate on your spot trading deal.
Options, Options, Options
All these trading options don’t just stop at how you buy or sell your crypto investments. They also have an always expanding litany of experienced traders options. Futures trading, leverage trading, derivatives trading services, stock trading, crypto trading, social trading, copy trading and endless special “Binance offers” or crypto coins you can gamble with.
Their native token, BNB, is also just one of the tens of thousands of cryptocurrency assets that are available and tradable in their cryptocurrency market. You can use BNB to pay fees on their cryptocurrency exchange platform, use it on the Binance smart chain or just hold it as its own asset just like you would any other cryptocurrency.
Many experienced investors think they can use all these advanced features to earn passive income or just get rich quick, but history and virtually all logical scientific reviews point to the fact that it’s a losing strategy over simply buying and holding Bitcoin.
As you can see, altcoins perform abysmally over the long term and trying to time the market by frequently trading is a fools errand akin to gambling. While we heavily discourage these types of trading, it’s impressive to see just how broad Binance as a platform extends.
Disadvantages Of Binance
Requires KYC
Top of the list, but not unique to Binance, is that they require KYC checks that take days and are hugely invasive to your privacy in order to just sign up and use their platform.
Submitted documents are usually reviewed within 48 hours. However, it may take longer in some particular cases.
Binance
They want your full legal name, address, phone number, email, date of birth not to mention incredibly sensitive identification documents, live “selfie” photos and more. It’s painfully obvious by now that every company, no matter how big they are, will always eventually get breached by cyber attacks.
With 250 million users and all that incredibly personal information all stored in a single place it’s a giant gold mine just waiting for hackers to get in and steal it all.
Once they do, your private information will be in the hands of hackers and your personal security, online security and privacy will be incredibly compromised. They’ll know exactly where you live and can come threaten you or your family with a $5 wrench until you transfer them all your funds.
Meanwhile Binance will announce it’s “so sorry to all its customers”… and then do nothing and change nothing while you suffer their incompetence. To be fair to Binance it’s not entirely their fault. They are simply following legal requirements, but there’s zero reason you should have to surrender your security and privacy simply to use cryptocurrency exchanges. With our above non-KYC cryptocurrency exchange options you don’t have to.
High Trading Fees
What is entirely under Binance’s control are their trading fees, which are highly deceptive and excessive. While many people seem to think Binance has “low fees” this isn’t really true when you dig deeper. While their maker/taker fee of 0.1% is indeed very low, most forget to mention the whopping 0.00011 BTC withdrawal fee that they also charge.
As of writing, that’s about $10 USD per withdrawal! So although you only pay $0.20 for a $200 Bitcoin purchase, you can’t move it until you pay that extra $10+ withdrawal fee. This is clearly an absurdly high cost that’s just there to lock you into their trading platform.
Compare this with something like Bisq, which only costs $0.30 for a $200 Bitcoin purchase or 0.15% (for makers), but has no withdrawal fee and you can see that it’s not just the headline lower fees that matters, it’s the “got ya” hidden fees that novice traders often miss that really makes up the whole picture.
Endless Altcoins & Gambling
As has been proven time and again, altcoins and the endless speculating on them that Binance constantly encourages is extremely hazardous to your wealth. From the moment you hit their home page, to every interaction from buying, selling and everything in between they bombard you with altcoins or NFTs that muddy the waters and distract new or advanced users from focusing on Bitcoin.
No where is this more true than with their own private “BNB” coin that they fully control and can print infinitely for free. Sure, they state that it has total supply of 200 million, but there’s literally nothing stopping them from press a few buttons and printing another 200 trillion tomorrow.
Although the initial total supply was set at 200 million coins, the supply is gradually decreasing as a result of frequent coin burns
Binance
All this focus on altcoins, NFTs, “utility tokens” and the endless parade of meme coins encourages day trading, gambling, margin trading and the huge risks that comes with them. Of course Binance does this because it’s hugely profitable for them, not you.
Every time you trade they take a cut. Every time you deposit money into their platform they trap you, slogging you $10+ to withdraw it again.
In contrast, proper cryptocurrency exchanges don’t try and shove useless “new” or “top gainer” coins like Peanut the Squirrel or the CoW Protocol in your face at every turn. They simply focus on providing the best trading experience and financial security when buying or selling bitcoin.
Has Full Control Over Your Funds
Beyond the huge privacy invasion of KYC, Binance like other large exchanges insists on having full control of your Private Keys. This means they have full control over your funds at all times, can (and regularly do) lock you out of spending them and can see, record and sell all your private transactional activity.
They can see all your transactions. All your addresses. Any address you send funds to and how much funds you own at any given time. All this information is tracked, passed onto governments and very likely sold to third parties.
Even if you don’t care about the privacy implications or them selling your data, it means they can steal or lose your funds at any time. Everyone thought FTX were a big, responsible company and that their funds were safe being held with them. Now they’ve lost billions of customer money.
Even if Binance never goes belly up, customer routinely report that they’ve been locked out of their accounts, given no reason or recourse and cannot trade or withdraw their own money for weeks or even months.
These are all the risks you take when keeping your coins on any exchange and is why you should always, always, hold your own private keys by ensuring your bitcoin is held in a wallet only you control.
Infuriating Support & Complexity
Finally one of the main disadvantages of Binance is their notoriously terrible customer support. Sure, they may have every type of trading of all types of digital assets, but that also means that when something goes wrong it’s extremely complex to fix or get support for the thing you need.
Most support queries must be made via email which can take days to resolve. If you don’t wish to use that, your only other main choice is to use their chat bot which of course just spews out automated FAQ answers to things that likely aren’t going to solve your problem. Worse, these answers are often in Chinese too.
On top of all this, Binance doesn’t have an official headquarters location, which makes it difficult if you ever run into legal troubles with them. They’ve moved their headquarters multiple times in the past, often due to countries kicking them out due to various issues.
What To Look For In A Crypto Exchange
So now that we’ve seen why Binance is a bit of a dumpster fire of a cryptocurrency exchange, let’s go through how you should be assessing one, whether you use our above alternatives to Binance or something else.
Regional Availability
First things first. There’s no point digging deep into a particular cryptocurrency exchange and spending hours looking at reviews or their app if it doesn’t even work in your country. Unfortunately many exchanges aren’t available in major countries like the USA, UK or Europe and as such it can be hard for many to find a reliable and efficient platform.
Binance specifically isn’t available in the United States, Canada, Netherlands and a few other countries as per their List of Prohibited Countries.
If you travel to a location included on our List of Prohibited Countries, Binance Services may not be available and your access to the Binance Services may be blocked
Binance Terms
One of the best ways around this is to simply use fully open source peer-to-peer trading platforms that have no company or “headquarters” to speak of. Some of our top Binance alternatives such as RoboSats and Bisq aren’t companies, they’re software based trading tools. Free software that anyone, anywhere can run and use to trade bitcoin for trashy fiat currencies 24/7/365!
Many companies like Hodl Hodl or Agora Desk have been chased out of the USA resulting in very few legitimately good options, but these are all centralized exchanges. If you want a cryptocurrency trading platform that you know will be available in your country forever, it’s best to go P2P and open source.
You can also go to our Crypto Exchange Comparison page and use the filter option up the top to only show exchanges that are allowed in your country to help narrow things down too.
Privacy & Security
We always prioritize your safety and privacy here at Athena Alpha and that’s especially true when it comes to picking a good crypto exchange. So, before buying one cent of bitcoin please read:
These two free pieces (along with their also free Advanced and Expert counterparts) will help ensure you don’t fall down the wrong rabbit hole and include a number of critical safety measures. One the main safety measures already discussed is to ensure that your cryptocurrency exchange doesn’t require KYC/AML.
After ensuring you’ve side stepped the endless problems with KYC it’s also critical to ensure that you always have full control over your own private keys when picking a cryptocurrency trading platform. You should never be keeping your coins on an exchange or letting them hold your private keys. Any good Binance alternatives must have a non-custodial or “private” wallet by default.
This ensures that they cannot steal or lose your funds like what’s happened time and time again to countless other crypto exchanges over the years. Think we’re exaggerating? Why not take a stroll through our always expanding Crypto Exchange Bankruptcies list to see just how many billions of dollars of customer funds have already been burned. Don’t make the same mistake as those others!
Finally with regards to privacy and security measures it’s always great to ensure your new crypto exchange has more advanced features such as full end-to-end encryption (E2E), can be used via the Tor network, is peer-to-peer (P2P) and operates using fully open source software (FOSS). These key features are what truly separates the average crypto exchange from the top tier ones and all our above suggestions score tops marks.
Good Trading Liquidity
Once you’re sure it’s a safe and private trading platform, you’ll also want to ensure it has sufficient liquidity. What does this mean? It means there’s lots of other people also using the same platform to buy and sell digital assets. This ensures that when you put in an order to buy some bitcoin, there’s other crypto investors out there available to sell to you.
You might also want to check if the crypto exchange has other trading pairs if you’re wanting to trade or get rid of other altcoins. This could include spot trading for those crypto assets or other advanced trading options like options trading.
Competitive Fees
Next up is to ensure that the cryptocurrency exchange has nice, simple low fees.
Again you can use our comparisons page to see all the exchanges and what they charge for maker / taker fees, as well if they have any hidden withdrawal fees as well.
There’s some fantastic exchanges out there like RoboSats which has a 0.025% maker fee (meaning just $0.05 for a $200 Bitcoin purchase) and free withdrawals which is done over the Lightning Network, meaning you don’t even need to pay the Bitcoin mining fees, just a few sats for your routing costs.
Summing Up
If you’ve read this far then congratulations, you now know a huge deal more than the average person on how to identify and chose not just a good Binance alternative, but a great cryptocurrency exchange. We’ve been at this for many years and have seen all the tricks. From hidden fees to huge multi billion dollar exchanges going bust.
The main things to remember are:
- Never use any exchange that requires KYC
- Never use any exchange that insists they hold your private keys
- Never accept stupidly high trading or withdrawal fees, they’re just not required
- Never use any exchange that encourages day trading 10,000 different types of scam cryptos
- Look for exchanges that respect your privacy and security
- Look for exchanges that use FOSS code, run P2P and don’t hold user funds
The common theme with all the big name cryptocurrency trading platforms is that they lure you in with supposedly cheap up front deals or fees and a flashy interface. But once you’ve spent 1-2 days getting “verified” and giving them every piece of private data for them to sell the “simplicity” aspect falls off a cliff and you’re stuck dealing with their ridiculous service desks while your money is trapped.
Even if you manage to trade as promised, they’ll do everything they can to stop you from withdrawing your funds off their platform. From huge withdrawal fees to accounts getting “locked due to suspicious behavior” it’s not worth it overall.
On top of all this, any purchased bitcoin is forever tied to your real world identity, completely defeating the original purpose of Bitcoin, which is to be a digital version of cash which is by default anonymous or at least pseudonymous.
Thankfully there are still some fantastic Binance alternatives out there as listed above. They’re freely available to everyone, everywhere and are only getting better and better as time goes on.
FAQ
What Is The Best Alternative To Binance?
What the best alternative to Binance is depends on whether you’re a beginner just looking for a simple trading platform or an advanced trader wanting to use many different crypto services. For those wanting to simply buy Bitcoin, we’d recommend either Hodl Hold or Peach Bitcoin for their ease of use. If you’re in the USA where those aren’t available we’d recommend Bisq.
Why Was Binance Banned In The US?
Binance was not banned in the US, it was instead charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act, found guilty and paid fines of $3.4 billion to FinCEN and $968 million to OFAC as part of the settlement. According to the official press release: “By failing to comply with AML and sanctions obligations, Binance enabled a range of illicit actors to transact freely on the platform”. As a result of all this, Binance made a complete exit from the USA.
Is Kraken Better Than Binance?
It depends, but not really. Kraken scores slightly higher than Binance in our huge Crypto Exchanges Comparison list, but ultimately it’s not really a great Binance alternative as it also scores extremely poorly on privacy, security and many other things we test cryptocurrency trading platforms for.
Is Binance Is Better Than Coinbase?
Both Binance and Coinbase score equally as dismally in our Crypto Exchanges Comparison list. Binance does have a few more payment methods and cheaper trading fees. But because both require KYC to purchase or do any sort of cryptocurrency trading we do not recommend either.
