Binance operates the world's leading cryptocurrency exchange in daily volume and transactions (1.4 million per second). However, the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority moved to block Binance in mid 2021, from operating in the country. While Binance can continue offering crypto trading services to Brits, Binance was ordered to notify users that it is not authorized and can't open new trading accounts in the UK.
So, let's move on to an alternative to Binance in the UK.
Coinbase: Your Alternative to Binance in the UK
Coinbase is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. As of October 2021, it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. On April 14, 2021, Coinbase went public on the Nasdaq exchange via a direct listing, making it one of the most reputable crypto trading platforms worldwide. You are probably wondering if this giant is available to local clients. The answer is yes; Coinbase accepts and opens crypto trading accounts to clients based in Angola. It's one of the only 13 countries in the African continent where Coinbase takes clients.
With almost a decade of experience -The company was founded in 2012-68 million verified users, 9,000 institutions, and 160,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries trust Coinbase to invest, spend, save, earn, and use crypto. This is an impressive achievement for a company that operates remote-first and lacks an official physical headquarters.
There are no restrictions for users from the UK.
A view of Binance' Crypto Trading Platform
Still want to Know About Binance?
Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, is the founder and CEO of Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange that managed to become the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. This Chinese-Canadian programmer, seasoned in developing high-frequency trading systems for Wall Street flash boys, knew how to redirect his experience in this field and apply it to the emerging crypto environment.
Beyond being the largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, Binance offers multiple products and services; its core objective is to build a broad ecosystem in the blockchain sector. In this regard, this ecosystem consists of numerous variants. Of course, the cryptocurrency exchange stands out among them and the wallet services for its users, crypto laboratories (to launch new tokens), charity, information, and education, among many others.
Binance recently announced Binance Pay, a contactless, borderless and secure cryptocurrency payment technology. It allows users to pay and receive crypto payments from friends and family worldwide, and it is available to all Binance users.
Also, they have launched Binance Smart Chain, one more step towards achieving their decentralization goal.
Binance Crypto Offering
Binance divides the coin offering into sections to make the search more accessible, so whichever "group" of coins you are interested in, you may filter them from the sea of available tokens.
Categories are:
DeFi: DeFi is short for "decentralized finance," an umbrella term for various financial apps in cryptocurrency or blockchain geared toward disrupting financial intermediaries. The most popular DeFi coins by Market Cap are Uniswap (UNI), ChainLink (LINK), Terra (LUNA), PancakeSwap (CAKE) and Aave (AAVE)
Innovation: This is the group of new, innovative tokens that are likely to have higher volatility and pose a higher risk than other tokens. The most popular tokens on this group are Sushi (SUSHI), 1inch (1INCH), and Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA).
POS: With Proof of Stake (POS), cryptocurrency miners can mine or validate block transactions based on the number of coins a miner holds. Top POS coins at Binance are BNB (BNB), Cardano (ADA), and VeChain (VET).
Polkadot: Polkadot is an open-source sharding multichain protocol that facilitates the cross-chain transfer of any data or asset types, not just tokens, thereby making a wide range of blockchains interoperable with each other. Top Coin is (by far) Polkadot (DOT), followed by Kusama (KSM) and Reef Finance (REEF).
NFT: Nonfungible tokens prove ownership of a digital item – image, sound file or text – in the same way, that people own crypto coins. Unlike crypto coins, which are identical and worth the same, NFTs are unique. Top NFTs are Chiliz (CHZ), Decentraland (MANA) and Enjin Coin (ENJ).
POW: Short for Proof of Work is an algorithm used within a Blockchain network to achieve trustless and distributed consensus. In short, what started the Crypto revolution. In this group, you find the big boys: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc.
BSC: Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a blockchain network built for running smart contract-based applications. BSC runs in parallel with Binance's native Binance Chain (BC), which allows users to get the best of both worlds: the high transaction capacity of BC and the smart contract functionality of BSC. In this group, you will find every token which runs in the Binance ecosystem.
Storage: These are tokens that provide an economic incentive to distributed cloud storage networks. The top coins in this group are Filecoin (FIL), BitTorrent (BTT) and Holo (HOT).
Coinbase is a massive trading platform from the US. Does it open accounts to locals?
CAN I TRADE CRYPTOS WITH BINANCE FROM THE UK?