What Are The Lowest Fee Cryptocurrency Exchanges?

When starting out on your cryptocurrency journey, one of the first things you need to do is purchase some coins. You can do this on a big popular exchange such as Coinbase, but these larger exchanges often charge high fees. In this article, we’ll discuss the lowest fee exchanges you can use to buy cryptocurrency.

Why are fees so important to consider when picking an exchange?

Many people don’t understand just how much fees can impact your long-term performance when investing in cryptocurrencies. Even though you need to pay a premium for using the exchange, you don’t want to pay more than you need to. We’re not talking about a $150 fee per year, but an average of 0.2% to 3% per trade is not only something you should consider, but something you should watch out for.

Some of the worst fee-heavy exchanges out there are Coinbase and Coinmama, both which charge 2%+ on most transactions on their platforms, while some good exchanges with low fees charge as little as 0.2% per transaction, yes 1/10th what Coinbase and Coinmama Charges!

Keep in mind while they charge high fees, Coinbase and Coinmama, they are infinitely better than using a non-crypto brokerage like Robinhood to buy crypto, they charge even higher fees (although they often hide it in a spread).

Kraken

Kraken is one of the largest and most popular bitcoin exchanges currently operating. It has a great reputation in the crypto community, and it’s well known for its security.

In addition to bitcoin trading pairs, Kraken offers trading in euros and dollars and despite being one of the most-trusted their fees are less than half of what Coinbase charges. Kraken also offers several other altcoin trading pairs for other cryptocurrencies that aren’t offered by most big exchanges, such as Ripple and Ethereum Classic.

Binance

While binance offers lower trading fees than most exchanges, they are very complicated to use for newbies as the user interface is fairly confusing, and it can be difficult to navigate. They have slightly lower fees than Kraken, and offer more alt coin trading pairs, but ultimately aren’t as trusted as some other exchanges due to having ties to China.

Ultimately we think this is nonsense and they’re trustworthy, but hey they still have fees.

Voyager

This is a new exchange that is making waves in the crypto community. They’ve come out and said they will charge absolutely no fees on all trades, and we were not quite sure how they’ll make money.

That is until we did some research on various cryptocurrency websites and found out that they do actually charge fees. They just hide it in the spread. Ultimately they charge less than other brokers, for example when you compare Voyager to Coinbase you see that while they do actually charge some fees those fees are negligible in comparison.

Gemini

While gemini is another big-name crypto exchange they offer less fees than the biggest ones, like Coinbase, but are just as regulated and trusted, if not even more trusted compared to Coinbase.

Their fees and platform are similar to Kraken, with a so-so interface and trading pairs for multiple altcoins. 

UniSwap

Okay Uniswap isn’t a traditional exchange so maybe we shouldn’t be throwing it in here, but it’s a placeholder for DeFi exchanges. You see Defi exchanges can be the lowest fee, nearly fee-free, depending on network congestion. This is because there is no central counterpart taking a fee, but rather two independent parties trading freely on the free market (or really on the blockchain).

This means there can be 0 fees when trading in a decentralized manor, but in practice this usually isn’t the case due to network fees. But it’s something to consider, particularly as ethereum 2.0 and other scaling solutions for Defi such as polygon become more popular.

Lowest Fee Exchanges Conclusion

There’s a lot of low-fee exchanges out there, but make sure you do your research before buying any cryptocurrency. Use this article as a starting point and dive deeper into their reputation and security measures before deciding on which exchange to use.

Personally we prefer using Voyager or Gemini when it comes to low-fee exchanges. They offer the best value for trust balance in our opinion.