Recently a major news hit the cryptosphere: Binance moving to cryptofriendly Malta! That was a breath of fresh air for the users, which had no more reasons to fear Japanese regulations can lead to closing down of the exchange, which would have led to many potential loses. But there was even a bigger news in that announement: Binance is actually planning on opening Fiat to Crypto pairs available threatening the hegemony of Coinbase!
And why does Coinbase have to worry since they have the first mover advantage? Well, for once people are more and more fed up with the exuberant fees Coinbase is charging for any purchase of crypto and while the process is almost feeless in their exchange GDAX, the more spread out option of buying crypto from coinbase or from their phone app costs a significant amount of money in fees. On top of that the prices seen on coinbase are usually marked up (sometimes even as high as 50 USD more from the current GDAX price when buying or 50 USD less when selling bitcoin, which is outrages). The other disadvantage of Coinbase is they only support 4 crypto currencies and probably Binance's plans of opening fiat trades lead Coinbase to announce they are working on supporting ERC-20 tokens.
So clearly a huge rivalry is heading our way which will be awesome for the investor because competition brings down the fees and ups the quality. It is remained to be seen which exchange will be predominant, but in my humble opinion Binance have the upper hand as so far they were executing perfectly every move and on top of all are working towards bringing a decentralized exchange, which will actually be the future of the exchanges in my opinion and the next step in the crypto evolution.
I would like to hear your thought as well on the topic!
