HowTo Buy Crypto – Part 4: Kraken
Founded in 2011, Kraken, also a U.S. based company, shares San Francisco, California, with Coinbase as its headquarters’ location (although their physical address information is not available on their website). Kraken’s home page begins by describing what they consider to be “THE BEST BITCOIN EXCHANGE”. It logically follows that they aspire to reach those goals. They also claim to be the largest exchange in Euro volume, which can be confirmed by looking at the stats on Coinmarketcap, and to be consistently rated the best by “independent news media”.
Kraken has 5 tiers of account types, from Tier 0 simple account sign up without ability to deposit or withdraw, to Tier 4 “Individual High Value Account or Corporate Account”. After satisfying important Tier 2 account identification verification requirements, you can deposit and withdraw fiat within certain daily and monthly limits. Euro SEPA deposits are free and a US bank wire costs $5.00. You can consult the Kraken FAQ for more specific fee information.
Kraken has a global reach and offers USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and CAD trading pairs for BTC, along with a variety of pairs for BCH, DASH, EOS, ETC, ETH, GNO, ICN, LTC, MLN, REP, USDT XDG, XLM, XMR, XRP and ZEC. Their trading fees are competitive and can be seen on their Fee Schedule page on their website.
Information regarding their security practices can be found here and many answers to other specifics on their FAQ
Previous posts in this series:
HowTo Buy Crypto – Part 1: LiteBit
HowTo Buy Crypto – Part 2: Coinbase
HowTo Buy Crypto – Part 3: GDAX
Read the "The Dos and Don’ts" here if you're not aware of my rules.
For what it's worth for any folks considering opening up a Kraken account, I found it to be the least intuitive of the platforms I've tried (although I'm probably just slow). I'd recommend folks either check out tutorials (https://blog.kraken.com/post/212/how-to-get-started-trading-on-krakens-new-trading/) or even YouTube Kraken walk throughs to help them navigate it. Its powerful no doubt once you get more comfortable.
I do love that Kraken lets you trade on margin though. Yes, this is effectively the equivalent of using wildfire from King's Land to light a candle if you have no idea what you're doing. But for those who feel strongly about a particular short-term position, nice way to take a quick position.
P.S. You also can't buy BTS on Kraken so -1 there :)
And a word of advice to all readers: be careful with margin trading - make sure you completely understand how it works and what you're working with. A lot of people had their accounts blow up on the last downturn because they didn't fully understand what they were getting into.
Agreed. For anyone interested, I'd suggest reading this before getting too deep: https://www.thebalance.com/margin-101-the-dangers-of-buying-stocks-on-margin-356328
An excellent overview and Kraken is an exchange that benefits from a number of advantages: working conditions, competent and attentive support service, low commissions on the market, the possibility of margin trading (which will increase revenue by using the trading leverage), fast transaction speed. All trading on the exchange takes place on the site in the tab "Trade": here you can use the trading terminal, choose currency pairs from the list, create orders. Convenient terminal TradingView has already established itself as a program with advanced capabilities for technical analysis of the market (the graph can be opened in an additional window, moved and scaled at your discretion, indicators, graphic elements, etc. are available). The platform is considered ideal for beginners, because here everything is arranged simply, clearly and logically, there is nothing superfluous that could impede full trading. Thank you @cryptographic
Good rundown. Sounds like you've had a very good experience with them so far!
If you are new in crypto like me and don't know where to start or what to do, check this article, it helped me find the good exchanges, save a lot in commission fees and showed me how to earn free coins (not many but a little of different coins, who knows, maybe one day they will be worth a lot) :
https://medium.com/@the_max/cryptocurrency-trading-tips-6d3ed585f11e
Also, there is plenty of other articles on medium by different authors, many of them linked to crypto, check them out too!
Nice introduction, although I would recommend other alternatives when it comes to Alt trading - will cover that in future posts.
BTW, be sure to tell all those Medium authors about Steemit and the fact that they can earn real rewards over here! 😎
Thanks for helpful suggestion my friend. It will be good for newbie. Thanks again @cryptographic
Today the best working and most common way for me is to buy Bitcoins at exchange. If it is not about purchase of your first bitcoin and not about buy of coins for 5-20$ and not about getting bitcoin within 5 minutes and not about the only one and last purchase, then I definitely recommend to think about creating your account at exchange....
link below
@cryptographic
http://www.andrejders.com/2015/11/14/how-to-get-bitcoins-exchanges-kraken/
Nice step by step and realtime examples. Thanks for posting.
Welcome Sir..it's working
@cryptographic Kraken works well through SEPA, has an easy verification process (expect 4-6 weeks vetting with current backlog) compared to Bitstamp, and is very knowledgeable when it come to cryptography and security , and they have Cheapest rates and fastest times for trading, depositing and withdrawing & Has successfully resloved site-wide timeouts and trading engine lag , what i didn't like is Recently disabled stop-loss and other trading features without giving explanation to the community , can you review coinmama it's my best website to buy crypto for now , new users can have a problem with verification it's take a long time now
@cryptographic,
This is the 1st time I decided to visit their page! Actually I heard about them before, but never tried their services! Today I checked them and found these details. My country has one of the top notch stupid rule as we can't send bank wires out of the country. So, again I got no chance to try this exchanges as well.
Here What I found about Kraken and I am suggesting you to review CEX.IO and COINMAMA.COM as well. Those exchanges has credit card options and allow my country to BUY crypto via them. Actually I wish you will compare those exchanges after your introduction about them.
About Kraken:
Company Location:- San Francisco, CA, USA
Company Launch:- 2011
Deposit Methods:- Bank Transfer, Cryptocurrency (No Credit Card payments :/)
Withdrawal Methods:- Bank Transfer, Cryptocurrency
Available Cryptocurrencies:- Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin,
and 14+ More
Community Trust:- Great
Security:- Good
Fees:- Very Low
Customer Support:- Okay
I have found these information via https://coincentral.com/kraken-exchange-review/, therefore I can't give 100% guarantee about it. Because it's not my personal experience.
Cheers~
Kraken is one of the best-known exchanges in the bitcoin community. It’s a popular, high-liquidity exchange that offers trades across a diverse range of pairs – including more obscure pairs like Ripple/JPY and DASH/CAD. If you’re looking for a high-liquidity exchange that’s well-regarded among the community, then Kraken may be a good option. Thanks for sharing such an useful article.
are there terms and stages to get the account level from each 5 tiers?
I've never tried the kraken but it's very interesting to exchange, and I think $5 not much.
Thanks for this information @cryptographic
https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/201352206-What-are-the-Verification-Tiers-
thanks @cryptographic for this link