The cryptocurrency exchange Binance was considered not only as the largest, but also the best, until this year. The abundance of services, accessible interface, a variety of trading pairs and instruments allowed the exchange to grow day by day, and in fact in the global practice, and in the practice of cryptocurrencies, this business is quite young.

However, the year 2021 along with the growth of the market exposed the problems of Binance, which, in addition, squeezed into a tight ring of regulatory pressure.
So what to do the average user, is there an alternative to Binance?

Of course, there are no irreplaceable people and services, so we offer three alternatives to Binance: OKEx, Bybit and FTX.

OKEx

OKEx is a centralized exchange registered in Belize. The site now features 278 coins and 482 trading pairs. The exchange was opened in 2013 and currently has a daily turnover of $6,146,912,822. There is its own exchange token OKV (OKV). The token has a capitalization of $5,869,913,931 and ranks 27th in cryptocurrency capitalization, according to Coingecko.

Trading Opportunities

OKEx provides a full set of classic trading options: spot trading (quick trades), margin trading in USDT, futures and swaps. Open fiat to cryptocurrencies direct exchange function via Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, ApplePay, MIR, Advcash Wallet.

Security, pros, cons of the exchange

OKEx requires user verification. Two-factor authentication for switching, financial transactions and changing some personal data are introduced as additional protective stages. Actions are duplicated via SMS-notifications and reports to the mail.

In general, the advantages of OKEx are a wide range of instruments and availability of different trading types, trading volumes and high liquidity of the site, a wide range of trading pairs. The disadvantages are the complicated interface for newbies and the obligatory verification procedure.Since March 2020, Solana has been partnering with blockchain oracle Chainlink to develop an ultra-fast and low-cost oracle. And in September, the USDT stabelcoin on Solana's blockchain was launched. In October, a crosschain bridge between Solana and Ethereum was developed, allowing the transfer of assets from one blockchain to another. At the same time, in partnership with Circle, the issuer of USDC, USDC was launched on the Solana blockchain.

Bybit exchange

Bybit is the youngest, but the most convenient cryptocurrency exchange in our selection. The exchange is a centralized type, opened in March 2018. It is one of the fastest-growing exchanges, and today it already has 2 million user registrations. Bybit has the smallest number of trading pairs - 28, but the exchange is developing at a fairly fast pace and is constantly adding new listings. The daily trading volume is $11,959,130,579, and the leader in trading pairs is BTC/USD.

Trading opportunities

The exchange only develops its trading proposals. Now there is classic spot trading, futures and open-ended derivatives. Bybit's key advantage, which is especially valuable to Binance, is the clarity of the terms of the trades and the absence of technical failures that lead to loss of assets.

Bybit has a number of advantages that make the exchange stand out. It's a simple, accessible interface that even a cryptocurrency novice will easily understand. The exchange is stable and safe in operation, compared to Bynance, has not "blacked out" on market surges or gone offline, has not been seen in major security scandals. Does not require verification, provides conditional anonymity. The team provides all technical support independently, without outsourcers, which is an additional plus to the security of customer data. Developed referral program and frequent promotions on the exchange.

The disadvantages include a rather stingy volume of trading pairs, no exchange token. - distributed storage. Validators upload data to a special network of nodes - so called Archivers. Archivers are not involved in consensus building because each archiver stores a part of the data (batch), not all of it. Periodically, the archivers have to prove that they are still storing their data. This system resembles the one used by Filecoin. Simple devices such as laptops or PCs are enough for the archivers.

FTX Exchange

FTX is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange located on Antigua and Barbuda. There are 266 cryptocurrencies and 432 trading pairs on the coin platform. The most actively traded pair is Bitcoin with the dollar. Daily trading volume is $1,844,856,589.

There is its own exchange token FTX Token (FTT). FTT has a capitalization of $5,594,410,297, a market dominance of 0.26% and 29th place in the cryptocurrency capitalization ranking according to Coingecko.

Trading Instruments

FTX, unlike Bybit, has a very wide range of trading tool offerings that are available. These include classic spot trading, tokenized stock trading, leveraged tokens, derivatives, Bitcoin volatility contracts (MOVE), Bitcoin hash futures (HASH), options and even predictive tokens (such as trump 2024).

The pluses of FTX include a variety of tools for trading, low commissions, fast deposit and withdrawal. As claimed by FTX: The FTX token (FTT) is the backbone of the exchange ecosystem, so holders are offered a set of rewards. For example, steaking your own FTT token or rebates from the trading commission.

The downsides include difficulty for novice traders.A new rally started on July 20 after it reached a local low of $23.49, which also happened along with the rise of bitcoin and the whole market. For the last month the coin grew in 2.6 times - from $25.77 to $72.74.

The reasons of the current SOL rally

The current rally started together with the general growth of the crypto market. Also, the growth of other popular cryptocurrencies slowed down to the middle of August and investors moved to the large but undervalued projects which lagged behind the leaders in growth rate. So, along with SOL, XRP, ADA and DOGE were growing nicely in recent weeks.

The SOL rally has some objective factors:

- Solana Labs sponsored the Lollapalooza music festival in late July;

- On August 4, the Star Atlas meta-universe launched the NFT Galatic Marketplace on Solana's blockchain;

- August 9 Wormhole, a decentralized protocol bridge between Solana and other leading DeFi projects, including Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, was launched;

- On Aug. 12, Mango Markets, a Solana-based spot market, credit and perpetual futures platform, raised $70.46 million in a token sale. Mango Markets gets liquidity from its own pools and the decentralized Serum exchange, also powered by Solana;

- A new NFT project, Degenerate Ape Academy, launched Aug. 15 on the Solana blockchain. A collection of 10,000 unique images of cartoon monkeys sold out in just eight minutes on the Solanart marketplace. Right now, the monkeys are only available on secondary markets like the NFT marketplace OpenSea. The highest price for the characters is already over 100,000 SOL - over $6.8 million at current prices.

Prospects for Solana

Solana is a promising project that attracts the attention of partner companies and investors alike. Solana is suitable for resource-intensive systems and applications focused on a large number of users and transactions: exchanges, marketplaces, file storages.

The alpha-version of the network has not been launched yet, but the project is already in the top 10 in terms of capitalization - an excellent indicator.

Right now Solana does not have a clear roadmap. In March, Anatoly Yakovenko noted in an interview that almost everything that could go wrong with the development of the project has gone wrong. The project team has an ambitious goal of attracting a billion users, and is confident that Solana can handle the load.

Among the nearest technical goals - to reduce time of block generation to 80 ms and trade timeframe (time scale to display stock quotes) on DEX - to just 1 ms (for comparison, the smallest trade timeframe of Binance is 1 minute). Yakovenko also noted that when DEX become more efficient than centralized exchanges, the latter will switch to a decentralized blockchain that provides this higher efficiency.

But having the most innovative technology is not everything in the crypto sector. Solana's cloudless future is not guaranteed at all. Even with all its advantages, the project is unlikely to move Ethereum from the throne of the tokenization king. Moreover, competitors, such as Algorand, Cardano or Polkadot, are stepping on its heels and have already launched minnets.

Time will tell if Solana will be able to solve the scalability trilemma and attract the desired billion users to its ecosystem.