Steemit Crypto Academy Contest / S1W2 – Reviewing Centralized Exchanges by @swaylee
Greetings Everyone
I welcome you all to my blog where I would be talking about centralized exchanges. This happens to be my second post for the second week of the engagement challenge. It's been post after post with no votes but we still have to keep pushing. It's not a new thing. I would be telling you about my favorite centralized exchange and why it's my favorite along with a couple of questions so let's get started.
Speaking in cryptocurrency terms, Centralized exchanges are places, sites and applications where one can exchange fiat currencies for cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies for other cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies for fiat currencies. Most recent and popular centralized exchanges come with their own in-built wallets for storing crypto currencies. Unlike decentralized exchanges, the central body or third party of the centralized exchanges hold our private Key for us and performs transactions in their stead. All you need to do is input a command like send Steem to @swaylee then input your password which you set when Opening the account. Their KYC is usually much since they are centralized, they tend to want to collect most of their users details like picture, address, National Identification Number and so on. They are usually more user friendly than most decentralized exchanges. Since they have access to your account, they can block or freeze your account whenever they see it fit.
Mistakes are Reversible
When crypto users come newly, some try to handle things on their own like the buying and selling and transfer of funds from one account to the other without asking people for assistance hence mistakes are bound to happen. Let me take for example if I mistakenly transfer 500 steem to deepcrypto instead of deepcrypto8, there would be no way of retrieval until the user decides to send it back but in a centralized situation maybe Binance if you report to the appropriate authority, they would look into the issue and reverse the money. So we can say that since they are in charge of their user's keys, they can help us reverse regrettable mistakes.
They make trading easier by accepting fiat currencies for exchange
In decentralized exchanges, to be able to carry out a transaction or a swap, you need to have crypto currencies to able to do that but centralized exchanges (majority) make use of fiat currencies especially $,€,£ even Naira. So if I want to perform a transaction on Binance, I could easily fund my account using my bank and change the fiat currency to any cryptocurrency (eg. USDT). When you sell, you can also receive this fiat currencies to your bank account instead of having to go around looking for who wants to buy the exact currency you have at hand.
They have their own in-built wallets and customer service lines.
This helps people monitor and keep their funds close by instead of having to always link a wallet or two with an exchange like in the case of decentralized exchanges. Centralized wallets come with their own customized wallets where all incoming and outgoing currencies enter. Also whenever there is a problem somewhere both on your part or on the part of the exchange, they have customer care lines which we can reach through their website or email which help us to reach out and complain to them for further assistance.
High Funds Security
Centralized exchanges especially the ones most used by the masses e.g Huobi, roqqu, Binance. They know that numerous hackers around the world are trying to get through and hack their application so their security gets higher and top notch. Once there is any small fault in the system, they halt transactions and fix it before they continue with their day to day activities. That's why from time to time you would see Binance suspend steem transactions for a while to fix a service downtime or two.
The amount of cryptocurrencies listed on the platform. Some exchanges have really limited amount of coins and many traders would love to diversify and try out new coins. Let me give an example of GMT, over the past 1 month it rose a 100% so if I wanted to buy it but the exchange I choose doesn't have it listed, I wouldn't be able to buy and would have lost the chance to watch my money go up a 100% so I would leave it and look for another exchange.
The Features they Offer. A lot of features offered by centralized exchanges help everyday traders in one way or the other. We as traders are looking for exchanges with more options and more opportunities. For example, Binance offers p2p features, margin and future trading features with candlestick charts and up to 9 indicators for traders to make quick analysis without having to go to trading view or meta trader 4. Roqqu (a centralized exchange too) does offer up to half the features that Binance has so they would definitely lose some of their users to binance.
Their Customer service activity and response. It's no news that there are times when an exchange would disappoint you or you make certain grave mistakes then the only thing you can run to for help is a customer care service that doesn't reply their customers or gets the job done very slowly. People want a customer care line that would take care of the issue as soon as possible, if you have a bad experience with an exchange and their customer service is of no help then you have more tendency to leave for a much better exchange.
 |  |
|---|
My Favorite and most used centralized exchange is Roqqu. I'm sure most of you are familiar with it because from my numerous wallet observations, many people make use of it. The exchange was founded by Eseoghene Onomor and co-founded in 2019 by a man named Uche Nnodim. Their head office is located in Lagos State. It is a Nigerian exchange which offers brokerage services by helping us to buy and sell our cryptocurrencies. It is a really popular exchange and has grown exponentially. It is popular amongst Africans and used to withdraw a lot of Steemit mostly because they offer higher rates for steem. It does have it's ups and downs but still love it nonetheless. It is available on both Google play store and Apple store.
From the screenshots above, we can see all the unique features from the exchange like:
Savings: For those who want to HODL crypto or save in crypto, this feature allows one to lock and save their USDT ( a stable coins pegged with the US dollar) for a specified period of time [1, 3, 6 & 12 months] for different interest on savings depending on the length. The longer, the higher the interest.
Deposit /Withdrawal: Both the deposit and withdrawal can be done either from the bank account you have added earlier of from a variety of wallets that accept fiat currencies like Opay, Wallets Africa, Raven bank just to name a few. Now this feature is also useful for those countries which have been banned from trading cryptocurrencies for example, Nigeria.
Immediate Airtime Subscription: One can immediately subscribe for Airtime from the app. This feature is only available to Nigerians as the networks Available on the site are exclusive to Nigerians and they are really fast, immediately you click the button, the airtime enters as soon as possible.
Nothing is without it's flaws but my favorite exchange Roqqu is very flawed so much so that users tend to give up after a couple of uses. I shall be discussing a couple of them with you.
I often read reviews of users from time to time and even get complains from most of my fellow roqqu users that there is a very high chance of you losing your funds on transit. Some times you send Steem from Steemit and they would send a notification saying they have received it but when you enter the application, you would see nothing. If you come to them for assistance, they would delay and keep you waiting for days. My brother had a similar issue and after complaining to the customer care for several weeks, they finally resolved the issue after 3 weeks. This is one of the things myself and anyone out there would dislike about the platform.
I would love to change this first of all as this affects customer wellbeing and makes alot of customers lose faith in them. The customer care team should also keep in mind that their slow reaction time affects customers gravely so they should try as much as possible to put user's needs first.
The next thing I would love to change is that the app has so little features and haven't listed many coins just a handful. For an exchange to boast about being one of the fastest and hoping to improve with soo little features. Roqqu's competitors have taken greater initiatives to improve their users and fan base but Roqqu on the other hand is developing too slowing.
I would love to have changes like including features and margin trading, adding liquidity, a large array of tokens and coins to choose from and favourable conditions to those living outside the country.
They are in possession of our private keys so they have full control of our account. If they suspect any suspicious Activities in your account or an amount that is really huge enters, they can freeze your account off a simple hunch and you won't be able to do anything about it.
In Countries like Nigeria where cryptocurrencies are banned, if it were a decentralized exchange, the ban would have absolutely no effect on it. The government or other regulatory agencies have no control over the platform neither can they stop their users with a mere ban. As for a centralized exchange, all Nigerian users would be warned and given heavy restrictions on the exchange.
As I said earlier, centralized exchanges are under the control of one central system and if affected by a bug or cyber hackers, it would take a great toll on the exchange and it's users. On the other hand, if hackers were able to attack a Decentralized exchange they would have to deal with the numerous nodes and this would prove tedious and nearly impossible for them.
Centralized exchanges are not immune to censorship and no anonymity. If the exchange responsible wants to hide transactions and expose some, they would do so without any attack. They can rat out everything about a transaction including the address of the user. They can easily manipulate transactions and transaction data since they are in-charge.
The first and most important way of ensuring that funds are safe and kept under our care is by moving to decentralized exchanges. Not just moving though, before you move you have to start by acquiring knowledge like the various decentralized exchanges and wallets that are not a scam and can help us and also knowledge about importance and use of our private keys. Some people just jump into crypto without having much knowledge on it so they end up losing to scammers or losing their keys which ends up locking their funds for good.
After acquiring all this knowledge, it's only basic knowledge that our keys be well backed up and kept safely from the eyes of others. Personally I would recommend offline key storage on multiple places like a hard wallet and a memory card or flash drive because if kept online, they are still at the mercy of hackers and scammers.
Centralized exchanges have really helped alot of people and although we preach Decentralization, most of us prefer Binance to anything a Decentralized exchange can offer so let's ensure to make use of both centralized and decentralized so it won't be all one sided. I believe that many Centralized exchanges are still growing, my favorite one might not be the best but they can still grow bigger and better.
The only reason I use roqqu is because it support easy sales of crypto to naira, if not😂
Exactly same here because the processes are easier and because steem price there is higher
I never heard about Roqqu until i read your post, thank you for sharing with us.