Beginners Guide to Binance: Cryptocurrency Exchange/Trading Platform
This year 2021, many people are showing interest in cryptocurrencies due to the bullish behavior of major coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many more. Just a few days ago, Bitcoin has bypassed 50000 USD per BTC-making the highest price it has ever reached. Right now, the current value per BTC in Philippine Peso is at 2.5M per BTC.
Who wouldn’t be interested in that as 2 weeks ago the price of BTC is just roughly at 35000 USD.
To surprise you, even more, the price of this coin is just around 10 to 13k PHP back in 2013/2014 if I remembered it right. I had an old post where I mentioned the price of BTC at that time and it was just around 300 USD.
But it’s not just Bitcoin. There are so much more cryptocurrencies circulating in the universe and 150+ of them can be traded in Binance.
So what is Binance?
Well, Binance is a trading platform and more. It was told all over the web that it has been the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world base on the trading volume since 2018.
They have many products or trading services to choose from based on your profile risk. Although they aren’t really profiling their users, I think each of their services is best suited depending on the risk profile of an investor or trader.
Also, some high-risk products have disclaimers and notices about the risk involved in them and some mini-quiz before participating. I have never attempted that because I really know nothing about that plus I’m not interested in high-risk stuff hehehe.
What are the products or services you can use from Binance?
They have 4 main categories in their site menu for these services. They are the Buy Crypto, Trade, Derivatives, and Finance. As a normal person, I really don’t know what derivatives are, but upon checking it those were the high-risk products they have on their platform.
But here’s a link to Investopedia explaining derivatives. I didn’t dare to read much about it as I really don’t understand, I’m not a beginner with crypto but I’m just a normal person that doesn’t go too much technical about finances HAHAHA.
Let me just mention each service they have in those categories and I’ll try to explain some of the ones I’m using.
Buy Crypto
This is your starting point if you don’t have any crypto assets yet. Before you can actually use their services you have to first buy crypto or fiat. If ever you already have some you can then deposit it directly to your spot wallet, for all supported currency, you’ll be given a deposit address. You can see your deposit address under wallet and it looks something like this:
There are 3 ways for you to buy cryptocurrency and fiat with Binance.
P2P
This means peer-to-peer trading. You’ll buy currencies from another individual or business at their set price, minimum and maximum amount of purchase, and available payment methods.
The price you usually see from P2P is quite high because it already includes transaction fees and you also get the convenience of paying using the alternative payment methods they offer.
As you can see on the image, the price is relatively higher than the usual cost. However, you can also see there that they have payment options like Bank Transfer, GCash, and PayMaya.
Another thing you can see on the screenshot is the number of orders made. Surprisingly, they are getting much order despite the markup on the price.
Even though we’re discussing buy crypto now, you can also earn money by selling your assets via P2P.
Visa/Mastercard
If you have a Visa or Mastercard, lucky you because you don’t need to get overpriced by the P2P market. However, purchasing crypto using cards also have a downside.
First of all, Binance has a 2% fee per card transaction as you can see on the image. Another thing to consider is the conversion rates of your card provider. When I started 3 days ago, I used Euro as the currency since I didn’t know that they have PHP. So the conversion of PHP to Euro took place on the transaction making it costly.
I also noticed that I had a 144.14 PHP charge at the time and I realized that it was an international transaction fee with my card. Even though I changed my currency to PHP and get away with conversion rates of Euro and PHP, I still get charged for the 144.14.
Third-party Payment
As of now, there’s only one listed 3rd party payment option for PHP purchase, other payment methods will only show up there depending on your local currency. For now, the only 3rd party option for us is Simplex.
Binance is continuously looking for other payment providers/partners and let’s just hope that there are more to come for noypis in the future.
Trade with Binance
There are different methods in trading with Binance. If you just wanted to convert one crypto or fiat to another in a snap, you can just go to Convert.
Now if you have to monitor or check the prices and market movement before trading with added options like limit, stop-limit, and buying or selling with the market price then you can use the Spot trading. They have 2 views on Web the Classic, and Advanced. I have the screenshots for the 2 layouts so it’s your chance now to play spot the difference hehehe. I really don’t notice anything aside from the layout itself but maybe pro traders understand the difference between the two. Trading with Binance is very easy as well on mobile and PC apps, unlike other platforms.
Lastly, the Margin trading. If you’ve experienced trading forex you probably know this already. A margin trading account with Binance allows you to transfer your spot balance to use it as collateral for borrowing assets from Binance and use it for trading.
This method of trading involves high-risk and requires advanced knowledge in trading. It increases your leverage as it can triple your capital for trading and so your returns but if you mismanage it and had continuous losses then you have to pay what you owed using different methods.
Derivatives
As I’ve mentioned, I really don’t have deep knowledge about this service, but I made a little research to explain some parts of it in a simpler manner.
Under this category, they have Futures that are margined with USDT or BTC, Vanilla Options, Leveraged Tokes, and Battle.
So what are these to a normal person or beginners? Technically, these are the thing you shouldn’t be looking forward to as a beginner because it involves higher risk. You can lose your entire capital in just a matter of seconds if you just deep dive into it without mastering the basics of trading.
Let’s talk about it anyway.
Futures
As mentioned above they are margined either with BTC or USDT. Since it’s margined, that means you can leverage your trades by borrowing from Binance. You can check this link to learn more about Futures.
It works very similar to forex margin trading if you’ve tried that already. Your orders with Future trading depend on the market movement. They call it BUY/LONG and SELL/SHORT.
In spot trading, you buy an asset for your desired or market price and if the price goes up then you sell to make a profit, then buy again when the price goes down. With futures on the other hand is predicting the price with a twist. If you placed Sell/Short, the price on the market should go down to make a profit.
Are you following so far?
Let’s say you placed an order for BTC/ETH and then you ordered it in Sell/Short with the price of 1BTC=10ETH(this is just an example). Then the price goes down to 0.5BTC=10ETH, the result of your trade wins and you just made a profit. So this sample doesn’t include yet the consideration of fees, the future contract terms, and the use of leverage.
That’s the twist part of it, you can take advantage of the leverage of up to 125x meaning if you deposited 100 USD, Binance can lend you up to 125x of your 100 USD, you can use without leverage or lower leverage if you want. But you have to be very cautious with it as your margined assets can be forced liquidated if the market goes against you badly and you didn’t have any risk control like stop loss.
If you’re an expert, then you should know how to use trading tools like stop-loss and take-profit options, there are a lot of tools available there to manage your risk but if you don’t know how to use them then skip this, for now, it’s for your future’s safety.
Vanilla Options
I swear I don’t know what it is so I embed a video from Binance to explain it so you can have an idea. But as with any of the services under derivatives, this is not advisable for beginners as well. Binance is showing a risk notice for this type of product.
Battle
Battle with Binance is basically like a game. Oh, actually they call it a game. In this game, you are required to fund your futures account. Also, you must not have any open or pending orders to participate. It’s very simple in its logic. You have to select the amount you wanted to bet and choose your prediction.
If you predicted the price to go up, you’ll be matched up with another Binance user that predicted the other way around. In each game, you’ll earn points whether you win or lose. The points you earn don’t have value at the moment but they encourage users to earn more points as they’ll be rewarding them in the future.
Aside from the game pointing system, the prediction you do is still similar to what I have discussed with the Futures. Where if you predicted the price is going up and it went up then you take profit and if you predicted it to go down and it went down then you take profit.
The only thing about this game is that each battle will last for 5 minutes only. So basically if you’re familiar with binary options it’s also like that but they called it a game for the pointing system.
Other Finance Services in Binance
This is one of the topics that are rarely discussed by content creators about Binance, and I think it’s because some of it is not included in the referral program.
But under this product category, my future investments for cryptocurrencies are bound to be placed here.
I’ve had some crypto trading background but I had a different mindset at that time which I realized was wrong, and a lot of things happened in the past that led me to lose so many cryptocurrencies. Of course, I’ll tell you more about it in my future post but for now, let’s talk about the other financial services of Binance. But you can see some of my old posts about the past below.
Binance Earn — One-Stop Investment Solution
Binance’s goal here is to offer a service that lets you earn crypto while you sleep.
Instead of trading your cryptocurrencies, you can put them into different Binance Earn products such as the following:
These are the low-risk or safe earning product of Binance Earn
- Flexible Savings — Here you can subscribe to a specific currency like BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, EUR, GBP, and more. Each subscription has its own 7-day APY and because it’s flexible you can redeem your subscription any time.
- Fixed Savings — If Flexible Savings can be redeemed anytime this one must be kept and held for some time. It’s just 7 to 90 days and the longer the holding period the higher the APY.
- Launchpool — This is a staking service that is flexible where you can stake your coin to a specific new coin. In return, you’ll get rewarded with some new coins that you can trade in the future. Since this is also flexible, there’s no lock-in period and you can unstake your assets to get them back if you want to. This is one of my favorites since I don’t trade much I only stake my coins and I get new coins that can be traded.
- Staking — It’s very similar to launch pool but this one has fixed terms.
- ETH 2.0 Staking — This is locking your Ethereum to the upcoming MAJOR update with Ethereum’s network. I’m going to write more explanation about this in a separate post as this is quite a long yet interesting topic. When you stake ETH with Binance your ETH will be locked until Phase 1 of ETH 2.0 is done.
High-risk products
- DeFi Staking — I am not very familiar with DeFi but you can check this link to learn more. According to Binance, they pick the best DeFi projects in the market but they have a disclaimer that they are not liable if the project didn’t succeed and that they are just responsible for transacting. But as similar to staking products you need to lock your assets by staking it to earn APY. Most of it is flexible anyway so you can unstake your assets whenever. They also have locked-in periods or fixed terms that have higher yields but can be unstaked any time, the only fixed there is the interest you’ll earn as that cannot be taken until the lock-in period ends.
- Dual-investment — this is a dual currency yield aggregator. All of it shows ended at the moment.
- Liquid Swap — As someone new to many of these I am not familiar with this as well that’s why I have added a video below to learn what it is. Despite a lack of knowledge of some of the products they offer, I decided to still include them in this post with references for everyone to get familiar with what Binance has to offer.
Another major product of Binance Earn is the BNB Vault
BNB is a utility coin that is issued by Binance, having BNB is very convenient for Binance users as it can be used to pay a discounted price for trading fees. But this utility coin has been gaining popularity as well in trading giving it a current value of 9450 PHP per BNB.
To keep Binance users holding this coin, they offered a product called BNB vault and they also included VIP features for holding a specific amount of it. By subscribing to BNB Vault means participating in all Binance earn products from the low and safe risk to the high-risk products.
The interest you may get from BNB Vault is of course changing depending on the performance of the different products it has participated with. Right now they are also providing LIT as a reward aside from the BNB yields that you have accumulated.
LIT(Litentry) is part of a Launchpool and since I’ve mentioned that BNB participated in all products Binance has to offer, therefore, it also means that your BNB is being staked to selected launchpool like LIT.
BTW despite being a utility coin for Binance, BNB is also traded with other major cryptocurrency exchanges.
Crypto Loans, Mining Pools, and Debit card
Binance also approves collateral loans with daily interest rates and maximum 90 days loan term. And they also have mining pools with 2.5% pool fees.
Apparently, Binance Debit Cards are not yet available in the Philippines. Hopefully, they can make it happen. If you’re using Binance make sure you pre-register for it so that they would know that many Philippine users are interested in it.
Binance has a really good reputation and has so many products that make their business stable and having that said, I think their platform can be trusted and future proof.
I know that I’m not an expert at everything about Binance but I am spending almost 8 hours and 30 minutes now trying to finish this blog post after 5 days of testing it and researching it out. I hope you’ve learned something today.
My current interest in Binance
Right now I haven’t used this for trading even though I know how to do so, but the reason is the price of the major cryptocurrencies now is quite creepy. Although, I have made a few conversions but that’s it.
My main interest now is growing my crypto assets, I started using the Binance earn products on Feb 14, 2021. That was just 5 days ago.
If you can see in the photo, I really have bad handwriting and I am only listing down the amount I’ve spent for investing which is a total of 9467. But technically, the amount I received on my Binance account is just around 9100.
Now in this photo, as you can see the only interest I earned from some of the products is just around less than 3 PHP but the total asset value has increased from 9467 to 9928.
That is because of the drastic change in the market price but also there are rewards like LIT and ETH 2.0 Staking happened on my account making an increase in my total asset in BTC.
I’m not expecting to withdraw any of this or trade regularly but I’ll try to add more every week whenever I can. I know and you should that one day the price may drop as hell but as I have mentioned, for this year my goal is to collect crypto assets despite the value. That’s why I am noting how much I’ve spent on it so that in the time that I am ready to sell the assets I would know the difference.
Last few words…
I’ll create another blog post soon with my journey to collecting crypto assets with Binance which I’ll be updating every month. So please follow us on social media or subscribe to my blog and channel for updates.
For the effort, I hope you’ll use my special referral link because I chose to set up a referral link for those who read it till the end. This referral link will give you a 10% kickback on my referral bonus. So instead of me getting 20%, I chose to give you half of it. Although, I believe the commissions only apply to trading fees, at least it can help us both in tiny ways.
Join Binance with my link to get 10% off on trading fees
Originally published at https://mielygraphy.com on February 19, 2021.
