Large-cap cryptocurrencies had been huge performers during 2019 and even though Bitcoin had returned into the spotlight, Ether continues to remain on the second spot, with over $30 billion in market cap and more than $8 billion in daily trading volume on exchange platforms. The token continues to fuel the Ethereum platform, the birthplace of much promising blockchain-based companies and at the same time, continues to be the best option for smart contracts, despite competition from EOS or Tron.
This year brought new alternatives to invest in cryptocurrencies, which is why we’ll analyze three of the most important categories, in order to help people who want to trade ETH to make the best choices.
Traditional exchange platforms
Judging by the numbers, the largest share of the daily trading volumes continues to be held by the traditional cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Despite one recent Bitwise research, showing that 95% of the volume declared by exchange platforms is questionable, there’s no doubt that many people use these platforms.
Source: pixabay.com
Although they are good for buying physical tokens and storing them in wallets, security concerns, as well as the lack of regulation, continues to be some of their main, which had remained unresolved until the time of writing. People continue to use them because of privacy features, but transactions costs are sometimes much bigger than they expect.
Cryptocurrency trading platforms
For the past year, we’ve witnessed the appearance of cryptocurrency trading platforms. In this case, people do not buy physical tokens, but instead derivatives based on cryptocurrencies that mimic the exact price performance of the underlying instrument.
With them, traders can profit from the market volatility and generate returns due to the large price fluctuations, for a smaller cost. Most of the platforms work with traditional exchange platforms to provide the best liquidity and accurate quotes for their customers, which is something to appreciate.
Online brokerage companies
Since the cryptocurrency market works based on the same principles as with any other financial markets, online brokerage companies had also started to include cryptocurrencies in their instruments list. Easymarkets, forex.com, XTB, and others, have CFDs based on cryptocurrencies.
Same as with cryptocurrency trading platforms, these instruments do not buy the underlying asset, but instead allow traders to profit from the market swings. In this case, the advantage is that traders have the ability to trade a wide variety of assets and they can include cryptocurrencies on their already-established portfolio.