When you use several exchanges, or perhaps you want to switch from one to the other, there is one consistent annoyance that everybody faces: high withdrawal fees. It can cost a pretty penny to move your funds! Fortunately, I have found a solution.
HIGH FEES ALL OVER
Withdrawal fees have been around for as long as there have been cryptocurrency exchanges, and they have been the topic of complaint for being high an equally as long time. It's a way for exchanges to make money, but perhaps also a way to 'lock' their customer base in and penalize them for leaving.Nowadays though, withdrawal fees are higher than ever. Most exchanges will charge an average of $10-15 per cryptocurrency that you wish to withdraw. This december fees were in some cases as high as $35 to withdraw a single crypto.
While this cost is easy to swallow if you're a big fish moving thousands of dollars, for smaller traders it can eat up a big part of their portfolio if they move their funds from one exchange to another. If you only invest $100 in an altcoin, you don't want to sacrifice 15% of it just to keep it safe!
Let alone a situation where you own a dozen different cryptocurrencies and you want to move them all to another exchange! You may pay more than $100 in fees just to move from, for example, Bittrex to Binance! Ouch! Sure those low trade fees on Binance are enticing, but that's costly!
HOW TO DO IT CHEAPLY
There is a trick to circumvent the high withdraw fees on an exchange, and that is to look for the crypto that is charged the lowest amount of fees and which exists on both exchanges. Once you've identified a coin that is cheap to withdraw, you sell your crypto's that you wish to move and buy into that coin and then transfer it to the other exchange, where you sell it and re-buy all your portfolio.Most people will tell you to use something like LTC for this purpose. And I'm telling you you shouldn't. LTC is fast and cheaper than most, yes, but it still costs you 0.01 LTC in order to move it from Bittrex. This equals $1.61 at the time of writing (but would be $3 if LTC was at previous highs). That's a lot cheaper, sure, but there are better and cheaper options!
I myself used to use XRP or Dogecoin to transfer between exchanges. XRP nowadays still costs you 1 XRP, so still a dollar or two. Dogecoin is super cheap and I highly recommend using that instead if both exchanges support it. Binance doesn't have Doge though (boo!).
USE VERGE (XVG)!
What both Binance and Bittrex do have however is Verge (XVG) and from what I can tell it's the absolutely cheapest method of transferring funds from Bittrex to Binance.The withdrawal fee for XVG is a mere 0.2 XVG, which equals about $0.01-0.02.
So for a mere cent or two, you could potentially move all your funds from one exchange to another. What you save in withdrawal fees, you can use to make up for any potential losses during the trade/transfer. If you time it well, you may even make a small amount on the trade/transfer too, but you'll still face some trading costs in order to trade into XVG.
For people like me who sometimes cash out some SBD to buy some altcoins this is perfect !
Bittrex is the only exchange I'm on that allows for SBD trading, but Binance has the coins I want! When I have only $10 worth of crypto on Bittrex it's hard to get it to Binance to buy something, but transferring through XVG actually makes it cheap and do-able. I can now cash out $10 and move it for $0.02 and for example buy some IOTA. Normally I would save up to a couple hundred dollars before I was willing to eat the withdraw costs, now I can move my SBD profits to Binance daily instead!
Since I'm very happy to have found this solution I thought I would share it with you all. I know some people feel like they are stuck on an exchange because they have a small stack and don't want to take the withdrawal cost hit to move, but using XVG takes away a lot of the pain in doing so.
