Bitstamp – Another legacy US available exchange, that sometimes makes the top 10 bracket depending on the listing you’re looking at. Only subject to a single small (phishing based) hack, the exchange has a generally good track record, but does not offer margin/options trading, or on-exchange staking or other yield farming options, with per-trade fees on par with Coinbase Pro. It’s mostly notable in that its markets tends to move a bit unpredictably compared to the rest of the world at times. Upbit – Upbit is basically -the- exchange in South Korea – more helpful hints – , and largely unused elsewhere. I was originally going to include these in the list, but the volume on even Uniswap was surprisingly low enough to not make the cut.
Like the previous two options, OKEX’s passive income offering is via sending things out to mining/staking pools. They supposedly offer staking services in-house for some coins as well, but I could find no detail on which ones or what the rates were. I unfortunately couldn’t even find a listing of what pools they have available, leading me to believe the option may not even get any significant use. Like Bitfinex, Kucoin has been around a long time, but hasn’t exactly had a stellar record, having been subject of at least one major hack/theft.
This is definitely one to pull your coins off of quickly if you do trade through it.
Like Binance, Huobi offers yield farming services by essentially contracting them out in various offerings with lockups. They do however offer better rates than Huobi per-trade. Liability is again placed squarely on your shoulders, and you have to take a more active role in picking which contracts to commit to. They’re basically the little brother of Huobi in most respects. The owner was recently arrested, which caused the exchange to lock all deposits/withdrawals for around a month. Fewer coins, fewer trading pairs, and more drama issues. This is definitely one to pull your coins off of quickly if you do trade through it. OKEX is another primarily Asia-market exchange.
On the other hand, KuCoin offers good fees, a wide variety of coin listings, and a large pile of passive income options. In most respects it operates like a lower volume version of Kraken, offering similar coin offerings, and better per-trade fees than other US based options. Like Coinbase, their coin variety listing is quite weak. Gemini – A US based exchange with a high professionalism score, and fees on par with Coinbase Pro, but much less market volume. While KuCoin technically does not serve US customers on paper, they do not implement any KYC policies and generally have a somewhat openly stated ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ kind of philosophy about servicing places they technically shouldn’t.