Review of 5 cryptocurrency exchanges -- Poloniex, Bittrex, Kraken, Liqui, and Gemini
Scores are standard report card A (best) through F. Chart provided as tl;dr, details below.
| Poloniex | Bittrex | Kraken | Liqui | Gemini | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liquidity | A | B | B | F | B |
| Market Selection | A | A | D | C | F |
| KYC | C | B | C | A | B |
| Server Response Time | F | A | C | B | A |
| Support | D | B | ? | B | A |
| Withdrawal / Deposit | C | C | A | B | A |
| Trading Fees | C | C | B | A | A |
| Usability / UI | A | B | F/B | B | B |
| Security Measures | B | A | A | B | A |
| Fiat Support | N | N | USD,EUR | N | USD |
Liquidity - Polo is king in this category, thanks to market entrenchment. Others are pretty similar, depending on which coins you're looking at, but Liqui's books are wafer thin.
Market Selection - Polo and Bittrex both have a wide variety of coins. Liqui doesn't have a ton of different coins but they do have almost every ERC-20 token, which is awesome for my personal interest. Gemini only trades BTC and ETH. Polo and Liqui offer the best selection of base currencies, having markets denominated in ETH and USDT as well as BTC. Recently Bittrex has started to add ETH denominated markets for ERC-20 tokens, as well.
KYC - Liqui is the clear winner on this category, requiring no KYC and having no withdrawal limits. Bittrex is the runner up as their KYC approval is automated where possible, for me it took only 10 minutes. Gemini was manual approval but pretty fast, Polo and Kraken were both rather slow (multiple weeks) because there's a lot of traders trying to get verified on their system.
Server Lag - Both Gemini and Bittrex earn top marks in this category, rarely if ever experiencing any technical issues. Liqui is a close runner up, a couple times have had slowdown to do DDOS but not often. Kraken is decent, and Polo is constantly having slowdown issues.
Support - All exchanges have been experiencing a bit of backlog due to the recent surge in interest. Bittrex and Liqui both close most issues within a week, often faster. I’ve had quite a few experiences with Polo having tickets open for multiple weeks, hence the low grade. I haven’t had to use Gemini or Kraken support much. The one time I needed Gemini support it was something stupid I did and they helped me out in a few minutes.
Withdrawal / Deposit - This category is for how often an exchange has issue with deposits and withdrawals. In my experience every exchange has issues with omnilayer assets, e.g. USDT, AMP, MAID. In addition to that I’ve seen some other random issues on both Bittrex and Poloniex. Liqui had issues setting correct fee on the Bitcoin network for some time, but seems to be in good order for the last month or so.
Trading Fees - Gemini offers awesome discounted fees/rebates for makers. Liqui has no maker benefit but their ETH markets are 0.1% and their USDT markets are 0%. Both Kraken and Polo have maker discounts in addition to fee tiers for large traders, with Kraken’s fee tiers a bit more accessible than Polo’s.
Usability / UI - Every UI leaves something to be desired, and that is partially because there are certain tradeoffs to be made. Some nitpicks: Liqui doesn’t render scrollbars but assumes you know which sections are scrollable. Bittrex has the buy/sell dialog flipped compared to most sites. IMO, the buy dialog makes most sense directly above the asks. One note, you can access Kraken’s new UI (in beta?) through trade.kraken.com, it’s a huge improvement over their old site, hence the dual score.
Security Measures - Every exchange offers a form of 2FA, mostly through google authenticator. Gemini being the exception here as they use Authy. Every exchange also offers email confirmations of withdrawals, which is great. Bittrex and Kraken also offer whitelisting of addresses, for an extra layer of security which is very nice for peace of mind.
Fiat Support - Pretty self explanatory. Every exchange that doesn’t offer fiat support does have USDT. Kraken even has a USDT/USD pair.
Hope you found this helpful. As you can see, there is no one exchange that excels in every category, so which exchange(s) you choose to business with is a very personal choice, depending on your specific needs.
Happy trading!
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