With so many terminologies and technologies involved in the crypto world, sometimes getting started is the hardest part. Ultimately to trade in cryptocurrencies you need an Exchange, to make better and easier decisions you need a Broker, and if you take a leap of faith, Bots can be dramatically impressive.
Let’s break this down a little to see how this all works.
Exchanges
Ultimately to trade with cryptocurrency, you have to get onto the market and be able to buy and sell digital coins. A market to do this in is provided by an Exchange. They will host an account for you, allow you lodge some real (fiat) cash onto your account, and therein begin to buy and sell coins. The coins you have available to you is based on what coins the Exchange has decided to host on their market. You typically receive plenty of information about every coin, can see their historical prices over time and can see what coins you can swap between. Every Exchange will charge a transaction fee for every buy or sell you make, this is how the Exchange ultimately makes their money. At any time, you can cash out some, or all of your coins and get real cash back out of the Exchange – the key is when is the right time to do that.
Some of the biggest crypto Exchanges include Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Gemini and Crypto.com. They all have their various merits and Pros and Cons. Coinbase is a great Exchange for beginners, but also has the option to become more advanced with their Pro Exchange. The are planning to merge these two Exchanges soon so you will have one platform to work at both levels. They include centralised and decentralised coins, as well as Web3 and NFT tokens. These coin types require a blog of their own but suffice to say there are lots of options of what to buy and sell in the crypto world.
One of the challenges with Exchanges is the vastness of the information, the coins available, the terminologies everywhere, the multitude of trading options and most difficult, getting the time to explore every coin and make well judged decisions on what transactions to make. This is where Brokers can help.
Brokers
Brokers are independant solutions or services which provide a way for Users to potentially make more effective choices of what to buy and sell, or delegate these choices entirely to the Broker so they may trade on your behalf.
In the traditional world of financial Brokers, this could be an actual inidividual or business who acts as a consultant and gives you direct advice on what to buy or sell or may make these trades for you. In the tradtional financial markets, these Brokers, like all finanical institutions are highly regulated and have to adhere to training, accreditiation and qualifications to be allowed to offer the services to the marketplace.
In the crypto world, these personal Brokers do exist, but unfortunately in the volatile world of cryptocurrency, they may not be the wisest choice. There is no clear mandatory legal requirement for individuals or businesses to be accreditated to deal with crypto based assets. Also, in a highly speculative crypto market, the actual value of subjective option and potential biase does not really add value to what is well understood to be a volative market. There a lot of suspect services out there thay be risky at times to trust.
This is why in crypto terms, Brokers are more likely to be online trading platforms which are linked to the crypto Exchanges. There is some ambiguity in the understanding of crypo Brokers in the marketplace as a number of Exchanges also promote themselves as Brokers, in that they will assist in your trading choices as well as provide the trading market platform.
In either case, these Brokers trade through the Exchange API system, which mean all trading by the Broker is completely controlled by the Exchange, so an online Broker can never break the rules of trading within the Exchange. However what they can do is be highly efficient at gathering the mass of data from the Exchanges, working their own specialised algorithms for trading and automate trading options to a point where they can pin point the best possible coins to buy and sell in any given moment. Trading on the market will always have risks but finding options to give you the best qualified choices is key in prudent trading.
CryptoCracker specialises in this, by creating a deep data analyis, calibrate to the coins a User currently has and automate a series of recommendations tailored for that User. These recommendations can then be run by a single click and make the best possible buy and sell transactions in real time for that User. This creates a huge saving in time but also more confidence in the highly considerd choices presented.
CryptoCracker is a specialised Broker, which integrates with Coinbase and Coinbase Pro as its Exchanges to trade with. It utilises the fact that Coinbase is the biggest Exchange known in the marketplace (arguably Binance would be seen the same) but also is known for its stability and confidence in the marketplace. There will always be controversy over choice of Exchange in the marketplace, but Coinbase is certainly a stable Exchange to develop your crypto experiences in.
Bots
Bots (short for RoBot) are automated processes which typically are instigated by a given platform and are allowed run for various durations to make a multitide of trading decisions on the go and continue to buy and sell coins over that time.
Sometimes, a Bot is as crude as a script which is written by a programmer on a bespoke basis, and just runs on a machine and make trades as it goes. A Bot can also be quite a complicated service which is maintained on a framework which starts and stops the Bot and can provide feedback as it goes to the given User. Typically the more advanced Bots run against industry standard algorithms and try to use best practice methods to make decisions that are well governed by predictive algorithms.
Bots in principle are a great idea and can often have great results. However there are a number of facets which can make them less desirable as a standard practice.
- They can be very technical and non user friendly to use. A lot of experience is needed to use them, understand their parameters and a lot of trial and error may be needed to fine tune the results.
- They generally don’t give great visibiltiy on their decision making. The algorithms can be very complex and sometimes may not appear intuitive unless the right perspective is used – which may not the perspective you want to use.
- There is always a risk of Bots running-wild in terms of what they perceive to be a series of correct choices. If not calibrated well, they may take a short term change they see as a signal to sell or buy whereas there are extraneous circumstances the bot can not possibly understand, and which may be too late to deal with. Thus you may end up with a seriously bad result just as easily as a good one.
CryptoCracker is designed to take the best parts of what a Bot does but ultimately allow the User to interact with those decisions that are are taken and thus allow for some human intervention when it is needed. Keeping things as automated as possible with the User still in control to make the ultimate decision to trade.
We hope this short article has helped to shed a little light on some of the basics around these key trading elements to make your time in crypto markets that little bit more positive and enjoyable an experience
Feel free to contact us with any enquiries with these areas or any other areas the CryptoCracker team can help you with !
info@crypto-cracker.com