Çoinbase Pro | Digital Asset Exchange
Coinbase offers good options for both beginner and advanced traders. The Coinbase platform is a good place for traders with experience to land.
What Makes Coinbase a Good Choice
With an account minimum of only $2, it’s easy to get started as a Coinbase user, making it a good place to start for beginners.
Coinbase encourages beginning crypto traders to learn more about their investments with the platform’s “earn while you learn” program. A series of video classes and exams allows beginners to learn more about various cryptocurrencies while earning rewards.
The exchange offers crypto staking. Staking is when a cryptocurrency is locked up on an exchange—usually for proof-of-stake validation—that allows the crypto owner to earn a yield.
One of Coinbase’s best features is its customer support. In addition to an online help center and chat system, Coinbase also offers live phone support, a feature conspicuously absent from many cryptocurrency exchanges.
As far as storage goes, there are numerous options for users to stash the keys to their crypto. In fact, Coinbase offers users three different crypto wallets.
The Coinbase Wallet is the exchange’s hot wallet product, and it claims to support “hundreds of thousands” of crypto assets. The other two wallets are the Coinbase dApp Wallet as well as storage available via Coinbase Exchange itself, which is the exchange’s “default wallet.”
Coinbase’s Disadvantages
The biggest drawback is that the fee structure for Coinbase’s basic version is relatively complex.
Fees aren’t published in advance, as they are are “spread fees.” That means they are calculated at the time you place your order, and may be determined by a combination of factors, such as location, payment method, order size and market conditions.
A downside for more advanced users is that although Coinbase offers staking on its platform, it charges a 25% commission on yields. That’s a sizable cut compared with other leading crypto exchanges.
Coinbase Features
Coinbase is one of the mainstays in the crypto landscape. The company went public in April 2021, and since then has maintained its spot in the public eye. Coinbase has an easy-to-use platform, but a complicated fee structure.
Fees
The basic Coinbase platform has an extremely convoluted fee structure. You don’t pay maker/taker fees or a flat fee, but a spread fee that temporarily locks in the price for the transaction. You don’t get to see the fee you’ll pay until you’re about to submit the trade.
Coinbases spread fees typically run around 0.5%.
For Coinbase’s Advanced Trade users, the company charges a much simpler maker/taker fee on all transactions.
Maker/taker fees are common on most crypto exchanges. A maker creates liquidity on a platform, while a taker decreases it. The only drawback for users is that they don’t know whether they are a maker or a taker until after a transaction.
As with most crypto exchanges, Advanced Trade’s maker/taker fees decrease as the user trades higher volumes of currency. View the full range of fees for Coinbase Advanced Trade in the table below: