Bybit vs Kraken

This is a comparison between Bybit and Kraken.

The cryptocurrency market is growing rapidly, with more and more people getting involved. The market is also becoming more mature and professional every day. With more traders and investors coming into the market, finding a dependable cryptocurrency exchange that offers a user-friendly platform, fast withdrawal of funds, and seamless spot trading and futures trading is essential.

My name is Leo; I am an entrepreneur and computer scientist and had my first contact with Bitcoin in 2013. I have been using different exchange platforms for many years now and have a solid overview of the existing products.

In this review, I compare the cryptocurrency exchanges Bybit, one of the biggest exchanges in Derivatives, and Kraken, the oldest (still existing) cryptocurrency exchange. 

We had a look at: 

• the companies behind
• the trading platform
• deposit and withdrawal options
• the fee structure
• supported cryptocurrencies
• security aspects
• customer service and
• the signup process

Let's get started and dive into the review. 

Bybit vs Kraken: At a Glance

Bybit vs Kraken: The Basics

What is Bybit?

Bybit is a Singapore-based startup that was founded in 2018. It is a direct p2p crypto futures exchange, and its main target is to sell perpetual futures products with up to 100 x leverage. Bybit is one of the fastest-growing exchanges in the crypto derivatives market and is currently number 3 in this category. 

Bybit's competitors include BitMEX, FTX, OKX, and Deribit.

Bybit's Co-CEO, Ben Zhou, was formerly a member of XM, a worldwide company for forex trading and CFD trading. These individuals hail from investment banks, technology firms, the forex trading industry, and early adopters of cryptocurrency.

The exchange is restricted in the United States of America, Mainland China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Singapore, and Syria.

What is Kraken?

Kraken is a digital currency exchange that offers spot and futures markets.

Kraken was founded in 2011, launched in 2013, and is based in San Francisco. It is a leading exchange for trading digital currencies and tokens and offers various services, including margin trading, stop-loss orders, and more.

Jesse Powell is the founder and CEO of Kraken. He got started with digital currencies in 2001. After Mt. Gox's security breach in 2011, he began developing Kraken 

Kraken is available to residents of 48 US states and 176 countries. They are only restricted to Cuba, Iran, Japan, and North Korea. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Trading Platform

Bybit can process up to 100,000 transactions per second. They have a dual pricing mechanism in place that helps prevent unfair liquidations. The powerfully trading API updates the data every 20 ms and integrates with the 3comma trading bot. 

Kraken has a flexible and intuitive user interface. The balances can be transferred between spot and futures seamlessly. Overall Kraken is good for beginners. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Futures Contracts & Derivatives

Bybit vs Kraken: Deposit and Withdrawals Comparison

Bybit allows only crypto deposits and withdrawals. Fiat Currencies deposits and withdrawals are not possible.

What you can do is to directly buy USDT, BTC, ETH with your Visa or Mastercard Credit Card (or Debit Card), SEPA transfer, Google or Apple Pay. You can also transfer funds to any other platform via sending cryptocurrencies and concert it there to Fiat money if needed. 

Kraken, on the other hand, allows fiat withdrawals and deposits. Usually, a transfer can take 1-5 business days through SWIFT, SEPA domestic, and wire transfer. 

Bybit vs. Kraken: Exchange Fees Comparision 

Bybit - Deposit and Withdrawal Fees

Bybit does not have deposit fees when trading crypto. There is a withdrawal fee, as shown in the following table. 

Bybit - Leverage Fees

Leverage is a financial instrument where you use borrowed capital. Experienced investors can use the leverage to multiply their buying power in the market. 

Bybit offers up to 100 x leverage. You need to put up an initial and a maintenance margin.
If you use 10 x leverage, your trading fee will increase by 10x. For example, if you pay a 0.075% fee on the value of 1BTC, at 10 x leverage, you would pay 0.075% von the value of 10BTC. 

Bybit - Maker and Taker Fees

The platform features a practical and straightforward way to determine fees, and they only charge when you remove liquidity from the market. Like many exchanges, Bitfinex follows the maker-taker (or maker-taker-maker)

Takers pay 0.075 percent. Makers can earn up to a 0.025 percent rebate. Currently, spot trading fees are 0.1%. 

💡 Market makers provide liquidity to the market and pay lower fees than takers. If you are a market maker, get rewarded for increasing the market depth of the order book. 

Kraken - Deposit and Withdrawal Fees

The deposit of Fiat currencies like Euro, US Dollar (USD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Australian Dollar (AUD), Pound Sterling (GBP), Swiss Franc (CHF), and Japanese Yen (JPY) is mostly free of charge. 

It is free to deposit cryptocurrency. Kraken sometimes charges a nominal fee for setting up the address. 

Fiat withdrawal costs you 0 to something up to $35, depending on your bank and currency you want to withdraw. It can take up to five days to process your request. 

You can find a complete list of the withdrawal fees and minimum withdrawal amounts for the available cryptocurrencies here. 

Kraken - Leverage Fees

For up to 5 x leverage, you only pay 0.02% free to open a position and another 0.02% rollover fee if you keep the position open longer than 4 hours.

Kraken - Maker and Taker Fees

Krakens trading fees are based on a 30 days trading volume. There are different levels. You start in level one with a 30-day volume between $-$100.000 with a maker fee of 0.02% and a taker fee of 0.05%. In Level 8, if you were trading more than $100.000.000 in the last 30 days, your maker fee is 0.0%, and your taker fee is 0.01%. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Supported cryptocurrencies

Today, Bybit is offering 138 Coins, 128 Perpetuals, and 165 trading pairs.

Kraken offers 101 Coins and 440 Trading Paris. Besides, that Kraken offers 5 Perpetuals and 17 Futures

💡 Perpetual contracts are derivative contracts similar to futures with no expiration date or settlement. 

Bybit wins since they have a more significant offer, especially in trading perpetual. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Security

One of the scariest aspects of investing in digital currencies, as well as for cryptocurrencies, is the level of security. We've all heard scary stories about hacking and fraud. Even though Binance is one of the biggest crypto names, they haven't been immune to security issues. None of the Crypto Exchanges (and bank) is completely safe. But do not worry about that too much. There is always a risk. 

Bybit Security

Bybit has robust security management in place. One of the most noteworthy features is that all Bybit addresses are multisignature (multi-sig) addresses. This means that there are multiple keys needed to authorize any transaction. This eliminates the risk of changes and fraud during the transfer process. 
They, of course, also have 2-Factor-Authentication and a strong SSL certificate in place, which is pretty standard in the space.

Kraken Security

Kraken is considered one of the most secure exchanges in the Crypto space. Kraken has its own security Lab in place, testing its own products and common third-party products like hardware wallets like Trezor or Ledger. I wrote a detailed review about Trezor vs. Ledger here.

When using Kraken, you need to verify your ID before moving any funds. Kraken also has 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication), which is also compatible with Yubikey. 

95% of Krakens funds are kept offline, air-gapped, and geographically distributed cold wallet systems. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Customer Support

Bybit offers multi-lingual customer support. There is no live chat, but you can contact the support via email at support@bybit.com. On Trustpilot, Bybit has a score of 3.5 out of 5 points and a total of 153 reviews. 3.5 is not great, but also not terrible. 

Kraken.com has 2.1 stars out of 5, which is not great. They have a knowledge database for quick help, and a live chat and phone support option from Monday to Friday 8 am UTC to 12 am UTC. 

Bybit vs Kraken: Signup process

Bybit has an easy signup process. You do not need to do the KYC verification; it can be registered within minutes with your email and password only. 

Kraken also has an easy signup procedure. You have to go through KYC and verify your account for futures trading.

On both exchanges, the verification level influences your transfer limits.

Bybit vs Kraken: The Outcome

We looked closely at Kraken and Bybit, both excellent in their area. 

If you are into trading derivatives, Bybit is the better choice because you have more contracts to choose from, and you can utilize the leverage of up to 100 x. Remember that you really should know what you are doing when using leverage; otherwise, you can be wiped out in milliseconds.  

Kraken is considered one of the most established and secure exchanges for spot trading. If you are not into future trading, probably Kraken is the better choice. 

You can signup for your favorite here. 

I hope you enjoyed my review; enjoy yourself and stay weird. 

Resources

Kraken Withdrawal Costs