With so many cryptocurrency exchanges vying for your business, how do you determine which one is the best? One important consideration is deposit speed – that is, how long it takes for your coins to move from your wallet to an exchange. In this article, Live Bitcoin News compares deposit times for several of the top exchanges.
Transaction Related Anxiety (TRA) – it’s not an official medical diagnosis, but for anyone who has ever transferred cryptocurrency from their wallet to an exchange or other third party, it may as well be. It’s that mini panic attack that ensues from the moment you click the ‘Send’ button on your cryptocurrency wallet until your funds have safely reached their destination. For me, the process usually goes a little something like this:
- Open wallet
- Enter the amount I want to send
- Copy and paste the destination address into wallet
- Double check that every character of the address is correct
- Triple check
- Quadruple check
- Hit ‘Send’ button
- Open transaction in block explorer
- Sweat bullets while I keep refreshing the page until I see the first confirmation
- Look up how many confirmations the exchange requires for my cryptocurrency deposit
- Refresh the exchange deposit screen repeatedly
- Worry about how screwed I am if I somehow got the address wrong
- More screen refreshing, sweating, and cursing
- Breathe a shaky sigh of relief as – after the 172nd reload – I see my deposit listed as pending
Is any of this sounding familiar? And that’s just for your run of the mill crypto deposit. The anxiety is even worse if you’re trying to squeeze in a deposit ahead of some looming deadline. Instead of resorting to hot cocoa and a therapy dog, wouldn’t it be nice to know, generally speaking, how long your crypto deposit will take ahead of time?
Which Crypto Exchange Really Has the Fastest Deposit Times?
I recently compared deposit times Binance, HitBTC, and Kraken – each listed as a Top 30 crypto exchange by 24-hour trade volume on CoinMarketCap. For each exchange, I compared the deposit times for those cryptocurrencies supported by all three exchanges using data from Bitcoinkit.com. Here are the results:
| Cryptocurrency | Binance | HitBTC | Kraken |
|---|---|---|---|
| Augur (REP) | 7 mins, 30 secs | – | 7 mins, 30 secs |
| Bitcoin Cash (BCH) | 20 minutes | 20 minutes | 1 hour |
| Dash (DASH) | 25 minutes | 5 minutes | 15 minutes |
| EOS (EOS) | 20 seconds | 40 seconds | 10 minutes |
| Ethereum (ETH) | 7 mins, 30 secs | 30 seconds | 7 mins, 30 secs |
| Ethereum Classic (ETC) | 7 mins, 30 secs | 30 seconds | 30 minutes |
| Iconomi (ICN) | 7 mins, 30 secs | – | 7 mins, 30 secs |
| Litecoin (LTC) | 10 minutes | 5 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Monero (XMR) | 6 minutes | 4 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Qtum (QTUM) | 12 minutes | 4 minutes | 1 hour |
| Ripple (XRP) | 10 seconds | 20 seconds | 10 seconds |
| Stellar (XLM) | 5 seconds | 10 seconds | 5 seconds |
| Zcash (ZEC) | 30 minutes | 5 minutes | 1 hour |
The average deposit time for the above cryptocurrencies is 10 minutes and 17 seconds on Binance compared to 4 minutes and 6 seconds on HitBTC and 24 minutes and 27 seconds on Kraken. No data was available for Augur (REP) and Iconomi (ICN) deposit times on HitBTC, but overall, it appears to be the faster exchange in terms of deposit times. That convenience, however, seems to be offset by the plethora of withdrawal issues that users of the platform appear to experience. With the exception of Ethereum, Binance’s deposit times are pretty close to that of HitBTC. Kraken, on the other hand, is slower for just about every cryptocurrency in the list.
But What About Bitcoin?
You didn’t really think that would forget about Bitcoin, did you? Here are the BTC deposit times across several popular exchanges:
| Cryptocurrency | Binance | Bitfinex | Bitmex | HitBTC | Huobi | Kraken |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | 20 mins | 30 mins | 10 mins | 20 mins | 10 mins | 1 hour |
Bitmex reports the fastest deposit time at just 10 minutes, whereas Kraken reports the slowest deposit time of one hour. Keep in mind, though, that Bitmex supports a significantly limited number of cryptocurrencies compared to other exchanges.
Before you deposit your funds on any exchange, do your research. Pay particular attention to any recent security issues and customer support issues and always keep your coins in your wallet until you are ready to trade.
Which crypto exchange do you use? Do you just use one exchange or do you use different platforms depending on which cryptocurrencies you are trading? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock