Binance vs Bitpanda – Fees, Features, Security Compared

March 28, 2022

While Binance doesn’t require much introduction for anyone who had at least a small exposure to cryptocurrencies, Bitpanda is a little less known crypto exchange.

However, judging by its ambition and hitherto success, Bitpanda is a name to remember as its relevance in the crypto industry seems bound to grow in the future.

As with our other comparison articles, this Binance vs Bitpanda duel won’t

lose too much time on the preface and we will skip right past it into the main body of this article.

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Binance vs Bitpanda: General info

Binance is one of the largest and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges which initially started in China but then relocated its headquarters to the crypto-friendly Island of Malta in the EU. Binance is popular for its crypto to crypto exchange services. The company raised around $15 million in an ICO in July 2017. It immediately acquired 20,000 registered users as part of the raise.
Binance exploded onto the crypto world in the mania of 2017 and has since gone on to become the top crypto exchange in the world.

Bitpanda is a cryptocurrency exchange that specializes in buying and selling Bitcoins worldwide but with a special focus on Eurozone. The company was started in late 2014 and has since seen a huge growth and become one of the more popular platforms for purchasing Bitcoins around Europe.

Binance vs Bitpanda: Fees

Standard Binance trading fees are 0.1%, but by using Binance native token BNB, you can make a considerable reduction to the fees, currently, 25% less if you check the option to pay fees in BNB (instead of paying them in the coin you are buying).

Type	Fee
Standard trading fee	0.1%
Credit card purchase	The higher of either 3.5% or US$10

Trading fee discounts

The discount	What it is	How much it is
BNB discount	A discount when paying trading fees with the BNB coin.	25% discount
Tiered trading fee discounts	A discount for holding different amounts of BNB in your account while meeting trade volume requirements.	Reduces base trading fees to as low as a 0.02% maker fee and a 0.04% taker fee.

Below is the comprehensive tabular overview of the Binance fee structure:

Level	30d Trade Volume (BTC)	&	BNB Balance	Maker / Taker	Maker/TakerBNB 25% off	Maker/TakerBNB x Referral 25% off x Kickback 20%
VIP 0	< 50 BTC	or	≥ 0 BNB	0.1000% / 0.1000%	0.0750% / 0.0750%	0.0600% / 0.0600%
VIP 1	≥ 50 BTC	&	≥ 50 BNB	0.0900% / 0.1000%	0.0675% / 0.0750%	0.0540% / 0.0600%
VIP 2	≥ 500 BTC	&	≥ 200 BNB	0.0800% / 0.1000%	0.0600% / 0.0750%	0.0480% / 0.0600%
VIP 3	≥ 1500 BTC	&	≥ 500 BNB	0.0700% / 0.1000%	0.0525% / 0.0750%	0.0420% / 0.0600%
VIP 4	≥ 4500 BTC	&	≥ 1000 BNB	0.0700% / 0.0900%	0.0525% / 0.0675%	0.0420% / 0.0540%
VIP 5	≥ 10000 BTC	&	≥ 2000 BNB	0.0600% / 0.0800%	0.0450% / 0.0600%	0.0360% / 0.0480%
VIP 6	≥ 20000 BTC	&	≥ 3500 BNB	0.0500% / 0.0700%	0.0375% / 0.0525%	0.0300% / 0.0420%
VIP 7	≥ 40000 BTC	&	≥ 6000 BNB	0.0400% / 0.0600%	0.0300% / 0.0450%	0.0240% / 0.0360%
VIP 8	≥ 80000 BTC	&	≥ 9000 BNB	0.0300% / 0.0500%	0.0225% / 0.0375%	0.0180% / 0.0300%
VIP 9	≥ 150000 BTC	&	≥ 11000 BNB	0.0200% / 0.0400%	0.0150% / 0.0300%	0.0120% / 0.0240%

Bitpanda fees for buying bitcoin (only bitcoin) are 1.49% and 1.29% for selling it. One important note is that fees are already incorporated into the price in real-time so they are not as transparent as other exchanges.

SOFORT and credit cards have a 2% fee (which is relatively low). Skrill has an additional fee of ~3.77%, and Neteller is a bit lower than Skrill. Using a voucher or Giropay is the cheapest method for buying Bitcoins on BitPanda. These are all fees charged on the Bitpanda platform, one of the services that Bitpanda offers.

The other service Bitpanda started is their Bitpanda Global Exchange, where you can do crypto to crypto trades. As for the trading fees on this division of Bitpanda, they are among lowest fees in the industry with 0.1% maker and taker fees, which can decrease even further depending on your 30-day trading volume.

In addition, you are able to get an additional discount of 25% when using BEST for paying trading fees.

Buying Limits

Binance introduced buying crypto with fiat last year, via their Binance Jersey daughter company. They use a service called Simplex to execute these orders. Simplex charges 3.5 percent of a transaction with a $10 minimum (flat fee). The daily limit is $20,000 per user, while the monthly max is $50,000 per user.

There is no buying limit if you want to do crypto to crypto transactions. There is a withdrawal limit of 2 BTC for unverified accounts which gets lifted once you go through the KYC procedure.

Buying limits are highly dependent on the type of account you have – is it light verified or verified. Also, the method of payment plays a role as well.

Light verified accounts: they can’t deposit or withdraw anything with credit cards or Zimpler. They can only use bank transfers and have a daily limit of 50k€ for deposits and 500k for withdrawals.

Fully verified accounts:

NETELLER and Skrill: After successful full verification, the 24-hour limit for NETELLER and Skrill deposits is 10,000 EUR and cannot be increased any further.

Credit card, iDEAL and Zimpler: After successful full verification, the 24-hour limit for a credit card, iDEAL and Zimpler deposits is 2,500 EUR and cannot be increased any further.

Bank transfer (SEPA): After successful full verification, the 24-hour limit for bank transfers (SEPA) deposits is 49,999 EUR.

Deposit and Withdrawal methods

Binance’s main platform used to be crypto-only, so you could do deposits in any of the 150+ supported coins. Same goes for withdrawals – you just need the address on blockchain of the coin you want to withdraw.

They have recently added the option to buy crypto for fiat in certain countries. The purchase is executed via Simplex, a third-party partner of Binance that processes credit card payments.

Verified users can use a host of different solutions to deposit fiat money into Bitpanda. These are: SEPA, GIROPAY/EPS, iDEAL, SOFORT, NETELLER, Skrill, Zimpler, Visa, and Mastercard to their Euro Wallet. Bitpanda To Go vouchers can be redeemed for cryptocurrencies directly.

Verified accounts can deposit with Skrill, Visa, and Mastercard to their USD Wallet.

As for withdrawals, EURO users can withdraw with SEPA, amazon.de, NETELLER, and Skrill while USD users can use Skrill.

Supported Countries

Binance does not specify which countries are supported and which countries are not supported but they did have a couple of episodes of sudden blocks for traders from different countries around the world. As for the U.S traders, Binance made a separate platform, Binance US, to serve only US-based traders and restrict them to use their main platform.

The Bitpanda Global Exchange allows crypto-to-crypto trading in 54 countries (the USA and China not included due to regulatory reasons). Fiat money deposits in Euro directly to the Bitpanda Global Exchange are possible in 54 countries (the whole EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, Monaco, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Georgia, Hong Kong, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Tunisia).

Supported coins

Binance has one of the broadest offerings when it comes to supported cryptocurrencies. The number of coins keeps growing by the week and it exceeds 150 coins at the time of this writing.

Bitpanda’s offering of coins keeps growing by the month. Right now it supports all the major coins like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, DASH, XRP, BCH, IOTA, EOS, ADA, Tron, LINK, BAT, Lisk, Waves, Cosmos, ETC, NEO, Tezos, ZCASH, XLM, Augur, 0x, OMG and their native tokens BEST and Pantos.

Customer Support

The customer service on Binance is also top-notch if you compare it with its peer exchanges. Worth noting, Binance provides customer support in 7 languages!

As of now, there is no Binance support phone number, but they do have a customer support section where you can submit your requests. The usual turnaround time is around 24-hours. You can also use their live chat support option as shown here in the restricted operating hours. Apart from that, their FAQ section is quite detailed and if you go through it well, you may not really need to contact Binance support.

Their customer support is email-based and pretty much in line with industry expectations when it comes to speed and efficiency. Meaning, good enough with room for improvement. But they are active on their social media channels and rating sites like Trustpilot.com so you will definitely have no issue in getting a quick response from them in case of a need.

Bitpanda does have a comprehensive support helpdesk where you have tons of frequently asked questions & answers.

Trust and reputation

In its two short years of existence, Binance has gained a reputation for being fast and ferocious—sweeping aside peers on its rise to the top as one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume. Even though it is still unregulated (by any major finance authority aside from alleged regulation by Malta finance authorities), Binance enjoys a very good reputation in the crypto community thanks to their charismatic CEO CZ and his good communication and community management skills.

Bitpanda worked for a long time without any official license and with unclear regulatory status. However, in April 2019, Bitpanda received a Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) license from the Austrian Financial Market Authority. The license allows Bitpanda to provide payment and new fintech services in the Eurozone.

Security

Binance says it’s been awarded an information security accreditation after meeting standards set out by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). For the audits, Binance was examined on 114 criteria across 14 categories, including security policy, asset management, operational security, and information systems.

Binance had an apparent leak of up to 60,000 users’ know-your-customer verification data, though it pointed a finger at a third-party service provider at the time. They also suffered a funds loss worth $40 million during a hack in May 2019. However, they had a separate fund for such cases and they refunded all users with the money from that fund.

Bitpanda likes to emphasize that they have never been hacked, which is a praiseworthy achievement and indicates their superior security system. The exchange has mandatory know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) verification. Crypto assets are held in cold storage while you personally have a couple of options to increase account security on Bitpanda by enabling 2FA and make sure to check you are always on the actual Bitpanda site (and not on some copycat scam website).

Other features

Binance is ferocious when it comes to expansion: they keep adding new features like margin trading, OTO options for traders, and similar. They also keep stacking new services on top of their original exchange platform: initial exchange offerings, staking, custody, lending, academy and education portal etc.

Bitpanda emulates bigger players like Coinbase or Binance in a lot of their moves: they launched their own token with similar incentive structure around it to what Binance setup around BNB, they also launched Bitpanda staking, Swaps, metals and a lot of other services around digital assets. They also split their services into two platforms (similar to Coinbase): Bitpanda (for beginners who are looking for an easy way to buy their crypto) and Bitpanda Pro (for trading professionals who look to trade coins with low fees).

Bitpanda also has an offer of Bitpanda Metals where you can trade and swap gold, silver, palladium, and platinum, just as easy as you can do with coins and digital assets.

Margin trading

One of the most recent features Binance added to their platform is margin trading. After transferring BNB coins from your regular exchange wallet to your Margin Wallet, you will be able to use those coins as collateral to borrow funds. Your Margin Wallet balance determines the number of funds you can borrow, following a fixed rate of 5:1 (5x). So if you have 1 BTC, you can borrow 4 more. In this example, we will borrow 0.02 BTC.

The interest fee on borrowed coins varies depending on your account level and the type of coin you borrowed. Bitcoin has the lowest daily interest rate of 0.0075%, followed by ETH at 0.01% and XRP at 0.02%.

Bitpanda offers no margin trading on their platform, as of yet.

Bitpanda vs Binance: Pros and cons

Binance Pros ✅

Easy to Use
Low Fees
Good Support
Lots of Listings
Good Trading Interface

Binance Cons ❌

Doesn’t offer phone Support

Bitpanda Pros ✅

Wide variety of payment methods
Great for beginners
Very low fees
Great security
Website is modern, neat and fully functional

Bitpanda Cons ❌

Fees aren’t explicitly stated

Binance vs Bitpanda: Final verdict

So who wins the battle between Binance and Bitpanda?

In terms of fees – Bitpanda is cheaper when it comes buying crypto for fiat while their spot trading fees are similarly structured.
In terms of supported currencies – unequivocal win for Binance.
In terms of regulatory compliance and licensing: Bitpanda holds an upper hand as it is officially regulated by Austrian financial authorities.
In terms of customer support: Both are of similar quality so it is a tie.
Deposit and withdrawal methods: Bitpanda is a clear winner in this sector with a host of different deposit and withdrawal methods available.
When it comes to security in the Binance vs eToro battle: Bitpanda is slightly better as they never had any hacks in the past, unlike Binance that suffered $40 robbery in May 2019.
Trading features: definitive win for Binance as their dashboard is a like a feature-packed spaceship in comparison to Bitpanda’s interface.
Overall reputation: Binance is couple of orders of magnitude more known in crypto communities but Bitpanda is carving out a niche for itself and its brand presence is growing slow and steady.

If you are not fond of neither of these exchanges, here is a list of potential alternatives: Coinbase, Cex.io, PrimeXBT, PrimeBit, Deribit, Coinbase Pro, Coinmama, Changelly, Bitfinex, Kraken, Bittrex, Bitstamp.