Receive a 5% discount when you open an FTX or FTX US account.
Like so many other people around the world, you may have begun paying more attention to the world of crypto since 2020. With the global crisis caused by the pandemic, more and more people around the world have looked at cryptocurrency as an alternative investment. This has caused a growth in the cryptocurrency trading market and in the popularity of crypto itself.
If you’re familiar with cryptocurrency, you may have already heard about FTX. It’s an exchange that was founded only in 2019 but that is growing fast and today, at only 2 years from its launch, it’s already considered one of the best exchanges available.
In this FTX exchange review, we’d like to explore why it is considered one of the exchanges, what are its pros and cons, and if it can be considered safe and legit.
What is FTX?
As we’ve mentioned, FTX is an exchange, that is, a platform through which you can buy, sell and trade cryptocurrencies. FTX, however, is different from most crypto exchanges because, while they are targeted at investors and people who can trade large capital, FTX is aimed at short-term crypto traders. This makes it suitable – and more suitable than competitors – to beginners and small investors while also being the perfect trading tool for professionals.
How to use FTX
One of the factors that are causing the success of this platform is its ease of use. TO start buying and trading your crypto on FTX, you need – first – an account.
Creating an account is very easy and it has different identification steps. The more data and information you provide, the more features are unlocked. This is not made to collect your private data for arcane purposes, but to ensure the security of the platform. Only users that can provide ID papers and that are 100% identified can trade on FTX. This is how FTX – and many other platforms – try to keep fake or malicious accounts out of the exchanging platform.
There are, therefore, three-level of verification:
- It only requires a verification email, name, country of residence;
- You need to provide your full legal name, date, and place of birth, proof of address (a copy of one of your bills), passport or driver’s license, and a picture. You need Verification level 2 to be able of withdrawing any amount you want.
- For verification level 3 you need to provide proof of address and a bank statement. You need this to withdraw FIAT to your bank account.
You don’t need to complete all the 3 levels of verification before start trading. They require time because the FTX team needs to verify the information you provide. But you can start trading straight away and go through all the verification processes in the meantime.
FTX: Main Features
Friendly interface
One of the reasons why FTX is suitable for beginners is its interface: it’s friendly and easy to read and interact with.
As you land on the FTX exchange website, you’ll find a navigation bar through which you can access all the platform’s trading products. There are also buttons that bring to your trading history, pending orders, and any other detail… all accessible from this simple navigation bar.
Many available orders
When compared to other exchange platforms, FTX offers a wider range of order types. These are the available ones on FTX:
- limit order
- market order
- stop market
- stop limit
- take profit
- take profit limit
- trailing stop
Financial products
Exchanges are becoming platforms that provide a lot of financial services. These products allow you to invest your crypto in different ways and boost your income. FTX isn’t the only one that offers such additional products, but their ease of use and the range of tools available are what stand out against the competitors.
Futures
Futures are used to lock the price of some asset – in this case, currencies – to prevent losses. FTX has a high number of futures pairs with stablecoins that they can use as collateral.
Leverage tokens
This is one of the most innovative products FTX is offering. It’s a feature that can assist you with risk management: while you earn your trade profit, this tool automatically reinvests your profit into the underlying assets.
There is no margin requirement to start trading leveraged coins and that’s one of the reasons why FTX is suitable for short investments, small investors, and beginners.
Options
This feature sets the contract to an amount (in USD) and the expiration period that corresponds to the expiration price. This is how traders can decide to go long or short with a leveraged position.
MOVE Contracts
This feature is FTX exclusive and it’s particularly aimed at beginners. It helps you see the value of a coin move’s price in USD for a period (for example, a week).
FTX Mobile
Other than from your PC, you can also access FTX from your mobile thanks to the app. Through the app, you can check your investments, but you can also buy or sell your crypto on the go.
FTX: trading fees
One of the features that make users decide what exchange to rely on is fees. Fees are the amount of crypto – or money – that you need to pay to the platform for their services. Anytime you do anything on an exchange platform – sell, buy, or other operations – you need to pay a fee that is always expressed as a percentage of the amount of crypto you are buying, selling, or investing in other ways.
There are different fees for different operations and the more you invest – that is, the higher your trading volume – the lower the fee percentage. On average, FTX’s fee goes from 0.04% to 0.07%. They are among the lowest in the market. Again, this can explain why FTX is becoming the favorite exchange for many investors.
Is FTX Legit?
Since it’s a new platform – competitors like Binance or Coinbase were founded, respectively, in 2017 and 2021 – many users worry about its safety and also efficiency.
Let’s speak about efficiency first. How fast can you exchange your crypto on FTX? This depends on the platform’s trading volume and, according to CoinMarketCap, FTX’s average daily trading is $36,514,340,000 which is far more than enough to ensure you can make your exchanges and trading on this platform quickly and at any moment.
What about legitimacy?
First of all, we know who the founder of FTX is: Sam Bankman-Fried. In a world of anonymous programmers, transactions, and investors (we still don’t know who invented Bitcoin!) knowing the person behind the project is an important sign of legitimacy.
Second, we’ve spoken about the three levels of users’ verification that FTX applies: FTX applies a lot of bank-like security features to keep users’ funds and information secure. The verification process also prevents malicious or fake accounts from accessing the platform.
Furthermore, FTX uses two-factor authentication and cold wallet storage to provide additional security and create an inviolable trading environment.
Is FTX legit? For all the reasons above, FTX can be considered 100%. Also, if we look at its history, FTX has never reported any hacks or security incidents since its foundation.
Is FTX exchange safe?
We consider FTX one of the safest exchanges after Coinbase. Coinbase is one of the safest exchanges but comes with an extremely high price. Coinbase fees are almost 10 times higher than FTX when you take into account FTX discounts applied to the fees.
If you are a long term investor looking to hold your crypto for at least several years, paying 10 times the fees it’s not a big problem, but if you want to invest with leverage, and make few months trades and take advantage also of other crypto products like staking or leveraged token than probably FTX it’s a much better option.
For most crypto exchanges the biggest risk factors are hackers and regulations.
Was FTX hacked?
There are no FTX hacks reported since October 2021.
FTX have really good security and did a great job, not being hacked while adding so many features and making one of the best platforms.
Security gets better every day in the crypto space, especially when it comes to centralized exchanges, so probably FTX won’t get hacked anytime soon.
Is FTX regulated?
FTX has relocated its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas because the Bahamas is one of the first countries to roll out comprehensive regulations for cryptocurrencies.
In addition, there is also a branch for US customers that comply with US regulations. FTX US is a US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange, built from the ground up.
FTX Customer Service
Before you deposit your money on any exchange, you want to be informed about their customer service, because anything can happen, and when it happens you want to speak to someone that can fix your problems.
FTX team is at the users’ disposal in many ways: Telegram, WeChat, and email. There is also a rich FAQ page and an additional “HELP” link at the bottom of this page.
FTX Pros and Cons
Pros
- Many features available
- Low fees
- Many financial products
- Suitable for both big and small investors
- No reported hack
- three-level verification
Cons
- Even though efforts have been made to make the platform suitable for beginners, there still could be some difficulties for them. They could improve this aspect by, for example, featuring a demo account through which users can learn before they actually trade.
Conclusion
Don’t forget that you receive a 5% discount when you open an FTX or FTX US account.
FTX is gaining popularity these weeks even though it still isn’t as famous as Binance or Coinbase. However, its trading volume is high and growing so that users can buy and sell with the same speed and efficiency as bigger exchanges, but with lower fees.
FTX is particularly suitable for small investors and beginners. For beginners, we mean someone that already knows how to trade and is beginning buying and selling small amounts and investing for short periods. People with zero trading knowledge can still have difficulties using FTX: it’s not a learning platform.
With our FTX exchange review, we hope we’ve just explained the reasons why FTX is considered one of the best exchange platforms available today. It’s complete, it’s user-friendly, it’s efficient, and it’s secure.
