Bitcoin Forum

What do you think is the biggest problem/what's lacking with current crypto exchanges? There are quite a few of them, they're making hundreds of thousands a day and yet I can't help but notice some things like...

-> Terrible, inexistant support (on most)
-> Verification takes weeks
-> Reliability (uptime) sucks

Personally what I'd like to see most is an exchange with FLAT FEES. Wtf why are all percentage based? With stocks you usually pay like $5-$10 per order. Here you end up paying hundreds if you trade bigger amounts.

So... what's yours?

1) Poor support giving no answers
2)Asking for photo ID
3)Wanting Google 2FA even when it is not possible on a laptop.

Interesting, yeah 2FA is annoying! I got like 20 now on my phone and lovely bittrex asks for it every damn time... with no other backup way of logging in

However I cant really see what they could replace that with

For now i would go for Support thing which people do really need this thing which exchanges should really be responsive on any tickets from users because people would really like to have a responsive support-(including me) but on the current situation most of them do have poor support or doesnt really respond at all.

FLAT FEES? Its not possible. They are doing business on here which means any orders would have a corresponding %/order.

Why not? Essentially all forex and most stock brokers work this way. Placing a trade costs for example $10. I don't understand why wouldn't they implement a similar structure?

Right now theres a problem with limits and verifications.

There's also always been the problem that you have to entrust the exchange with full control of your coins. I think the exchanges should hold your coins in some kind of multisig wallet arrangement to avoid losing your coins to hack or closure.

Yeah, the percentage-based commissions in Bitcoin trading always bothered me. It's been with us since the beginning, and I'm really not sure why it became the norm. Maybe it's the risk profile of operating a Bitcoin exchange. The risk of fallout from hacks is much greater than stock brokers because of the irreversible nature of Bitcoin payments.

Unfortunately, these exchanges weren't built to scale overnight. The kind of inflows exchanges are taking on is totally unprecedented. Both Bitfinex and Bittrex recently disabled new user registrations because they couldn't cope with the traffic. Then Binance was being touted as the top performing altcoin exchange. Today, Binance shut down new registrations as well!

The exchange situation is bloody awful right now. Terrible uptime across the board.

some exchanges have a poor support, I ever put a ticket in the one of big exchange two weeks ago and still no answer
I want a quick response but they just ignore it

Trust, reputation and fast systems, these are very classic things we deserve from exchanges. How about support ticket answer rate or answer speed? I used 4 or 5 exchanges and none of them replied my support tickets so far. This is only awful for them, what a shame.

For me most exchanges have poor support and it really is annoying how it could take them time to answer our problems. In fact, when there is a problem in them, they seem not to be concerned of the traders, users and etc. who used their exchanges. Not even a single announcement about what is happening. It really is disappointing and they should try to increase or upgrade their systems, they should be the ones adjusting to the growing numbers of transactions and users.

You cant help it they are just tightening their security so no excuses allowed if they are hacked and it would be difficult to hacked if every users has 2FA.

Recently, there are some exchange have problem with their investor.
Withdrawal stuck and high fee are my concern with the exchanger. I think thats the most problem that i dont like it very much.

Recently due to the huge amount of new users registered verifying on exchanges, and huge amount of investors on exchanges making them delay, and slowdown clearly, sometime transactions takes weeks with bitcoin, worse the fee the charge us on each transaction has risen too, nearly 20$ for each transaction, that is not acceptable.

Each exchange has different style of applying fee on their exchange. I dont really problem with statis or dynamic fee at least it can affordable. I have problem more in withdrwal problem.

Yeaaa they should do flat fee and that's enough for them as profit considering we pay the withdrawal fee too.
It is indeed a madness when you look at how they take a percentage on every single trade that we did.
How much money ghey make? Ughhhh so greedy they are!

My main problem is customer support. Most exchanges specify that support will be given within 48 hours of an e-mail being sent out, but for most exchanges I have had to wait for like 3 days. Hitbtc is one of the culprits with really bad support.

Maybe you have registered in bad exchanges which have a problem verification, withdrawal etc. I have a friend who have the same problem. The verification takes too long. There are good exchanges to trade with.

Regarding your want to have FLAT FEES. It is impossible to implement because that is business they too need money. I don't know any market that have FLAT FEES. Even stock market and forex were percentage based.

What do you expect from non-legit exchanges?
There were no regulations to follow, they can do what they want as long as most of their customers aren't complaining.

Not just exchanges, there are a lot of internet-based services that got terrible support.
But it depends on the number of the customers, more users more room for problems.
This is normal for some, a company that is not that big and those who want to be verified are just too many to handle will surely take weeks to do their job.
This is weird, I never experienced a downtime this past few years. (at least during my time online)

What I meant is them shutting down trading or new registrations during the most important (peak) periods

The main and the biggest problem for me I think is their customer support SUCKS. They always do, they don't reply to you or even take days to reply to you just saying "we will look into that matter". WTF They replied after few days and you will have to wait another few days to get resolve.

Lol, a few days is still good haha :D

I wonder why? I mean, they surely don't lack the financials to hire more support personel. Yes, there are probably hundreds/a few thousand tickets per day, but what's the problem with ramping up their customer support to eg. 100 people?

I run an online business with 25 virtual employees and hiring the 25 just by myself was no problem at all.

Especially when you consider that 'customer support' isn't exactly the most demanding position in the world...

Well the issue with poor support isn't usually entirely their faults.We have alot of people trooping into cryptocurrency investments nowadays and virtually don't know how to go about things and so end up messing up and will require support tickets.I think the way forward for exchanges is to have more support staff after all they make alot of money and can afford to pay more workers.

Nowaday transaction fess is to high. But you will know the transactions process. You will check the trades costume feedbacks before you will start the trading process. Some trades not time to transaction process competed. So you will check then you will process. Trading process time is important for the transaction. So befor you will check it. Any trading you will check for the process.

So far, this is the problem that I got from almost all of crypto exchange market that I joined.
1. bigger order, bigger fee.
2. lack of support (slow response, etc).
3. server (when some coin on its hype and many people start to trade it at the same time, it will crash).
4. and withdrawal time is not as fast as when we deposit into the exchange. just why?

This thing covers everything, I also experience this problem some time and its make me feel bad. Most of the exchanges are still not safe up to date since a lot scams are still happening. I am hoping that exchanges will continue to improved their services since this market is about to boom in the next few years. Better to be more competitive because a lot of exchanges will be made for good.

A lot of these problems are currently caused because Bitcoin got a lot more popular in these last couple of months.
I think that a solution would be for exchanges to temporarily close registrations until they can handle the influx of new users.

Another thing I'm a bit worried about is that some coinbase do not get their deposits credited, even after waiting months for it and contacting support several times.

I am yet to receive any kind of ticket reply from CoinBase... and waiting to have my limits increased since October 3rd (with zero replies so far)

My biggest problem with crypto exchanges are high cost in withdrawal transactions. As exchanges are considered to be susceptible to attacks I will feel safer if my investments are in my wallets. Having said that, transaction fees in general should come down if crypto currencies trading is to pick up pace.

I dont think they can do much about it (I am guessing you're mainly talking about BTC) - considering that a BTC transaction costs something like $30-40 now (wtf) they need to charge an appropriate fee to cover that

The transaction fees will be straight with the price of the currency itself, Remember when ripple cost about less than $0.01 and the fees was really cheap but ripple growth $3.4 for each coin and that makes the fees become ridiculous at all. But as long as the exchange site still able to manage their users and that will be fine

The biggest problem is they are not decentralizing!

That's a part of a business in crypto exchange site with have a high fees, but that's normal have a fees in every transaction.
Behind that transaction fees you're money that putting on trading will be safe as well.


I agreed with you, yes! these statement above are true mostly exchange site now like that, they are protecting you're money from different hacker if ever.  I think high fees are worth it of it.
But as what i have said that is okay as long as you're money are safe in their as wallet as well.

Exchanges are highly troubled at the moment with various issues, the first and most important one being security. Lately, a lot of exchanges have been targeted by hackers who in many cases have successfully breached past the exchange's security measures into the hot wallets, eventually emptying them. Every exchange needs to step it up and add more layers of security to its website.
Another issue lately has been transaction fees as withdrawal transactions are stuck in the mempool for a pretty long time because of lack of fees used while sending. Since most exchanges already charge a fee for withdrawal, output transactions should have optimal fee for fast confirmations.

Few hours ago, I checked my account in etherdelta. I noticed that the coin I sell is already sold. Now I want to transfer my eth becuase I want to use it to buy another coin. When I click withdraw notification appeared, it says OK blahblah with the transaction hash below. I clicked the transaction hash then i saw SORRY UNKNOWN TRANSACTION. I tried it many times but it repeats again and again. I asked one of my friend about it. He also do not know why it is happening and according to him, he is waiting his bitcoin in HITBTC. His bitcoin is already 2 days receiving. I do not know why it happening but I am hoping that it will be fixed sooner.

For me it is that they are not really regulate, they can at any time leave with our money it is quite disturbing, also the fact that it is not decentralized favors the hacking

For me is the biggest problem of a exchanes because of fee. Not all exchane are big pay

there were previous hacked on etherdelta, thats why some were changing their ETH address whenever I vsited some bounty campagins, I hope it will fixed too since its alarming and does affect exchanges. hitbtc were fine too for new alts entry.

So far I've noticed these problems.
1.Slow verification process of many exchanges like Poloniex and Bittrex. It takes weeks to be fully verified.
2.Slow response of their support contact.
3.High Transaction fees.
4.LAG that makes the trading delayed causing you to lose money.
5.Security? Because I'm very worried now storing large amount of  crypto in an exchange. Etherdelta is one.

Agreed with verification, some sites like bittrex is very sucks to verify our account. It takes more than 3 weeks in my case and still no reply from the support to verify my account. About the fees, it's hard for an exchange to take a flat fees. You know, the bitcoin network is different, when it crowded the fees become so high and the exchanges won't cover it.

True, but correct me if I am wrong - they dont actually pay any fees on trades (the bitcoin or altcoin that you trade isn't actually *sent* anywhere when you buy or sell). The transaction fees only come into play when withdrawing from the exchange (as they have to *sent* the BTC/altcoin to your chosen wallet)

I don't understand why something like this wouldn't be possible -

0.1% fee for trades <$7k
$7 FLAT fee for trades above $7k

I just don't see a fair reason for people to pay hundreds of dollars for placing big trades

the verification is not the problem of exchange its from the blockchain and miner.
most is the support and the server lag of the exchange i will be better if the upgrade there server so we can trade smooth.

for me the biggest issue now is laggy interface, now with a lot of new people trading i feel like my trading window is  delayed and i suffer loses from it

I am doing all my business on cex.io and it worked great since the January of 2017 but things got worse by the end of 2017 (December) and continued up to the day. Each day site goes off, registration for new user disabled, withdrawals delayed, even had to deposit my visa just to reactivate it. I am considering some other options in recent days.

Yes, Almost all exchanges work based on percentages these days and people end up paying a large amount of money while exchanging or transferring their money in or out of the exchange. They are making so much money off the people every day and it still appears they don't really like upgrading their services that is why people are encountering problems such as bad customer support, Verification takes weeks, and the uptime sucks.

Cex io is a fast one but the fee rate is high there as far as I know because some of my friends are using it. The problem with the rest, their systems are very slow for day trading. Sometimes getting stuck and it's terrible when you want to sell or buy tokens.

The slow trading sucks, I agree, although that is mainly due to the huge increase in volume lately.

Fast executions of orders either buy and sell would be one of the most important thing for me or any other day traders which do really need to be quick on placing or pull outing some trades. I havent tried out cex.io ever though but later i will test it out if it is much faster compared on the current exchange that im using as of now. Interface would really matter and also not to forget support is always should be prioritized by them.

For me, it's the maintenance that always get in your way when there's a good opportunity to make an arbitrage. And one more thing is the fees and I think it will increase more and more in the long run.

Poor Support is the biggest downside. In case there are any issues, reply from support would take forever. We can also balmer high incoming of users for this. The exchanges haven't been able to keep up with this rush of users and even closed new registrations. Let's see if they would improve their staffing before registerations are opened again.

Apart from this I haven't faced any issues on exchanges I am using.

definitely support on hitbc's end.....i believe theyre a legit exchange, but they need to move quicker. all these complaints they've been getting lately is going to damage their reputation if they don't find staff to handle issues in a more timely manner.

i lost my phone with 2fa ..

binance took care of it in 1 day
bittrex took 2 days
hitbtc has yet to help me going on day 4


it's a shame because when i was referred to hitbtc i was told they were one of the more reputable exchanges....this means they will ruin their own reputation if they don't start moving in the right direction. they have a lot of coins, are convenient for ico's, and have a great interface. they could actually be the best exchange if their support was more accessible.

There are so many verifications now and has a low limits. Exchangers can't deal with massive transactions, Slow updates, Lags and delays, and high fees. I can't even buy when i need it the most because of delays and too much time verifying of identities. I hope exchanges will narrow the problems and hopefully they can resolve it.

I'm thinking you want to be fast and do not waste your time and money. This is impossible because nobody creates a free exchange platform. Verification time means higher credibility, so do not complain about this.

You have to understand where they are coming from. Never would have they thought that their customers based would literally goes to thousands in short amount of time specially when bitcoin is going up. That's why we have this kind of lagging that makes us so frustrated and it a matter of minutes, instead of making tons of money, we ended up losing.

But its no excuse though from their end, they are business and just like any other businesses, they should make their customers happy. They need to upgrade everything from server infrastructure to support because if not for us I'm sure that they won't be making tons of money today because of the crypto world is booming.

We cant really blame the exchange platform now a days, with the sudden explode of crypto currencies, EXCELLENT exchange platform now become in-demand. In Cryptopia information alone, in the whole month of December they hit over 500,000 new user, imagine the stress work load it cause in there system? imagine how many of that new user file ticket? imagine how many employee do exchange have to handle their concern? I really doubt they foreseen that the crypto world will explode now a days (just like how we did not expect that BTC price would reach this high today), i think even them are shock as what is happening and did not prepare for it, either there system or there manpower.  So lets give them time to expand, because it wont do any good to bush them every now and then.

My biggest problem is that the supports of big exchanges take ages to answer your query and help solving your problem. I know that the user increase a lot but they should add more resources to the support. I don't have any problem with verification and fees, I agree that flat fee is better but hey as long as I can trade with a lot of liquidity then it's not a big problem.

the problems in some of the most boring exchanges are in support services, when some people have problems sometimes they are very slow to respond, and also the high cost of withdrawal.

Many are just crashing these days. Coinsmarkets, stocks.exchange.. I believe an influx of users is the major cause. They should fix it. Made a transfer on stocks.exchange yet to be credited. Have issues with deposits and withdrawals right now. 24 hours temporary freeze.

Yeah its the huuuge increase in users and trading, that's quite understandable, it's hard to prepare for that.

But what about the other problems? There should be exchanges with good support, flat fees etc. it seems the whole market is just soooooooooo similar, only differentiating factor is 0.1 fee vs 0.2 fee lol

Not to mention professional, big 4 accounting firms should be auditing these huge companies

That is always the problem exists in an exchange too slow to response from the support when their is a problem. But the most that we are sufferring is take long to process sometimes the withdrawal. And, the lag of exchange sites maybe too many users are also active. With these lists hope they will resolved the issues.

I would be a happy camper if those exchanges have a live support that will answer you right away 24/7. If banks can do it, why not exchanges? I believe they are handling big transactions too that needs immediate attention. They should have a responsive customer support.

There's also an increase of new registrations lately and it pushed the exchanges to halt new registrations and for me that's a good move but they should have anticipated that from the beginning if they really plan to go big in this kind of business.

True, especially that the support queries are usually fairly simple - "where is my withdrawal" "can you check on my verification documents" etc. This can be done with people trained in 1-2 days

I guess the reason that live chat is not available on exchanges is because there are simply too many people who are trading there and on top of it there are so many noobs who dont even know how to deposit money into exchanges and even end up depositing BCH to BTC and then calling the exchange scam.

The live support will only get bombarded by such questions and not legitimate queries - however even these queries are legit to some extent but there are other ways to prevent them too. KYC takes time and sometimes it may take upto 1month.

The withdraw problem i think, if you cannot withdraw your funds, then there is no need to trade on that exchange.

Exchanges simply cannot handle the traffic atm. They are also absolutely terrible at customer support. It just shows that the entire way people handle crypto is still in its infancy.

the thing I do not understand is that we trade currencies decentralize on  centralized exchanges ...

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There are many problem with some exchanges right now. Especially with the security issues. So here are my list:

1) Too much maintenance activity
2) Too lagging and sometime return to 404 error page
3. Withdrawal / Deposit transaction time, sometimes take a long time that activity will be processed.

Aint you down playing the fact that the hacking and scamming so far at exchanges have always had an insider, so that all those security measures are only as good as an exchange let them be. Looking back, I am afraid exchanges are and would remain the worse place to leave some significant amount of money better and unlike banks, their are hardly physical locations to turn to just in case.

I think the major problem with today's cryptocurrency exchanges is the up-time. People no longer have the guarantee if any of the major would work tomorrow or not. Whenever you are going to the exchange the only guarantee you have is when you type the domain name and see it is working that is the only guarantee. There is no doubt, if any of the exchanges went down today or tomorrow for that matter. I even heard the Kraken is down for about 48 hours now without any good information about what is really happening.

After the recent closure of the stock exchanges and hacker attacks on them. I'm just afraid to make money. And even more so to put a long-term orders. Don't know whether you go tomorrow or not.

one of the concerns about the current exchange is about its safety. security should be a top priority on an exchange, because the exchange holds a lot of assets of its users. may be some exchange does require to provide features an account with level of verification.

I can't say the support thing pisses me off too much because they got a bunch of users real quick that would happen to any business. What gets me is that each websites sets their own fee pricing, I don't understand why it cant be uniform across the board. I do however like the fact it is a % instead of a round number as this helps the little guy get skin in the game.

Thats true. Unfortunately a lot of the current exchanges including the largest ones are unregulated and with 'average' security at best.