Introduction
Binance is probably the best place to start for crypto beginners because it’s the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. As of 2021, they boast over 50,000,000 users globally. In 2020 they recorded an all-time high for 24-hour spot trading volume of over $15 billion in one day. The exchange offers over 200 tokens for trading.
It’s needless to say that Binance is a beast in the cryptocurrency space. They are even larger than many commercial banks. Binance is an absolute must-have arrow in every cryptocurrency traders quiver. Today we’re gonna dive deeper into Binance and get you through this Binance for Beginners tutorial.
Binance Home Screen
How to get started on Binance for Beginners?
When I first entered the Cryptocurrency world in early 2017, Binance was where I started. Just like some of you, I’m sure, I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that. I have learned a few things over the past 4 years with regard to Binance and crypto in general. I’m going to share that with you and take you through the platform step by step. Please note, that if you are situated in the USA, the Binance US website.
Sign up
Obviously, we first need to head on over to the Binance website. The signup process is pretty easy, your typical email and password requirement. After entering your email and password Binance will send you a confirmation email. This email contains a six-digit code that you should input on the registration screen. BOOM and you’re in.
Binance Registration
Next up, you’ll be greeted with a welcome screen that gives you the option of clicking through to your dashboard. Once in the Dashboard, you will receive a popup message which will ask you to increase your security via 2FA. You can do this either by phone verification or Google Authenticator (which is what I use). You can always navigate back to your dashboard by clicking on the “person” icon. The icon is located top right, then click on your email address.
Security
Enabling 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) is very much recommended. It’s really easy as well. Just download the App from the App Store or Play store and follow the instructions on the Binance website. Remember to write down or backup your secret key for 2FA retrieval. Personally, I keep a second device with a copy of my entire Google Authenticator app in a safe.
To authorize most transactions, you will require 2FA. Usually, you need to enter both an email verification code as well as your 2FA code. Sometimes this is a bit of a hassle but the added peace of mind is totally worth it.
Binance Security — 2FA
Verification or KYC
You will find the “Verify” tab next to your email address on your dashboard. This will bring you to the next screen which offers three steps of verification basic to intermediate and advanced. Each new step brings with it added requirements or proof of verification. These can include a government ID or proof of residence. Each level up also increases your transaction limits. For example, the Advanced level will enable you to deposit/withdraw up to $200,000 and/or up-to 100 BTC daily.
Binance Verification Levels
For the purposes of this Binance for beginners tutorial, we are going to stick with the basic verification which requires you to enter your nationality, a full name, date of birth as well as physical residential address. No need to provide proof of that at this stage, that only happens within the next levels of verification. You should be verified pretty much instantaneously.
Binance Basic Verification
Wallet
Now that we are done with adding 2FA security and getting verified, we can really start getting into Binance. The wallet seems like the most obvious place to start.
The first thing that we need to do is, make a deposit. Whether that be depositing Fiat or cryptocurrency. Binance offers 3 options when it comes to deposits. These are, depositing cash (limited to certain countries), depositing crypto or buy crypto with your credit card.
Binance Deposit
I am unable to deposit fiat currency into Binance from my country of residence, Namibia. The same goes for withdrawing fiat to my bank account. So mostly, I deposit crypto to trade or buy crypto straight from my debit card. Bear in mind, you are charged a 2% Fee for buying via credit card. To be honest, the speed and ease of the transaction make it worth it.
1. Buying Crypto with a Credit Card
As you are probably still new to all this, you most likely don’t own any crypto yet. So, buying some with a credit card just to get started is really the easiest. We’ll start off in the top left-hand corner of the screen, next to the Binance logo. Head over to the tab “Buy Crypto”. If you hover your mouse over that tab you will see the “Credit/Debit Card” option.
Binance Buy Crypto
The next screen will ask you the currency and amount that you wish to spend. You will also be asked which Cryptocurrency you wish to buy. Now keep in mind, you can not buy all 200 tokens available on Binance with your credit card. Probably only most of the top 10 and a few select others. If you want to buy something random such as Polygon (MATIC) for example, there’s an extra step involved. You are going to have to first either buy some Bitcoin or some USDt with your credit card. Then only can you trade that for some MATIC. We’ll get to that later.
Buy with Credit Card on Binance
BOOM💥. We now have $200 worth of USD Tether in our spot wallet.
Binance Spot Wallet
2. How to Deposit Crypto to Binance for Beginners
Head on over to the “Fiat & Spot” tab, under the wallet section. Next, you should click on the highlighted “Deposit” tab at the top of the screen. Then, I want you to click on “Deposit Crypto” in the top right-hand corner. Select the Coin you wish to deposit, in our case, Bitcoin (BTC). You will see your BTC address on the right-hand side of the screen.
BTC Deposit on Binance
Copy your BTC address and paste it into the send address bar on the sending wallet. In my case, I’m sending from Exodus wallet. Insert the amount of BTC that you wish to send — I will be sending “ALL” in this wallet. Click, send.
BTC Deposit made and Confirmed in Binance
BOOM💥. BTC received!
3. Withdraw Crypto from Binance
Still, within the Spot & Fiat tab within your Wallet section, navigate to the crypto that you wish to withdraw. Click on the withdraw, action tab. Here you will follow the exact same procedure that we just did for a deposit, but only in reverse. So first, you will be copying your destination address from the desired destination wallet. Next, you will be pasting it into the “Withdraw to Address” bar on Binance. Don’t forget to select the correct Coin at the top.
Binance Withdraw
Spot Trading on Binance for Beginners
For trading the spot markets, we need to navigate to “Markets” at the top of the screen. This is situated next to the “Buy Crypto” tab. Search the crypto or coin that you would like to trade. In the case of our tutorial, we would like to trade Polygon (MATIC). Seeing that we will be paying for MATIC with USDT (a Fiat pair) we will click on the “Fiat Markets” tab. Next, click on “Trade”.
Binance Market — MATIC/USDT
This will bring us to the trading window. Within the trading window, we have the option of either buying or selling the MATIC/USDT pair. (In our case, we are buying to stake MATIC — more on this later). This can be done with either a Market order (the current spot price), which will lead to an immediate transaction. Or, a Limit Order is when you input a specific target price at which you would like the order to execute. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be executing a Market order Buy.
To execute our Market buy, we will click on “BUY” at the top. Then enter the amount of USDT we wish to trade, $199.32 or maximum in this case. Make sure that the “Market” order tab is selected and click the green button, “Buy MATIC”.
MATIC — Market Buy Order
BOOM💥. Congratulations, you have just executed your first trade. As you can see in the screenshot below, we can now see confirmation of the executed Market buy. Once we navigate back to our Fiat & Spot wallet, we will see we now have MATIC worth $199. Or 142.2 MATIC.
MATIC Confirmed in Wallet
For selling obviously we would follow the same procedure, except that we would select “SELL” and then click, “Sell MATIC”.
Staking on Binance
In this next part, we will be staking our freshly bought MATIC tokens. Staking them will provide us with a cool, 34.47% APY. The catch, we have to lock them up for 7 days. Step one is for us to navigate to the “Finance” tab and to click on “Binance Earn”. Next, we need to navigate down the page to a block named, “Locked Staking” and click on view more.
Earn on Binance
Locked Staking on Binance
On the next page, we want to click on “Expand all 60 Locked Staking products”. Now scroll down until you see MATIC. As you can see, Binance is generous enough to give us a 34.47% APY (Annual Percentage Yield).
Stake MATIC on Binance
This means, that during the 7 days that we need to have our asset locked up, we should make an expected return of 0.661% (34.47% / 365 days * 7 days) or 0.94 MATIC. That’s not bad for a week’s worth of doing nothing. Now imagine we had 10K in there, that would earn us $66 in one week!
Stake Now is the button that we need to click. The next window will present us with a summary of the staking transaction. As mentioned previously, we can expect an APY of 34.47% and an estimated interest of 0.94 MATIC. Accept the terms and conditions and select, “Confirm Purchase”.
BOOM💥. You have now staked some crypto. You are officially earning a passive income from your cryptocurrency.
If we navigate to earn history under our fiat & spot wallet section, we will see our staked MATIC here. Keep in mind, this asset will no longer show up in your Fiat & Spot wallet.
Earn History on Binance
Remember, this is a guaranteed return. So no matter what happens to the markets this week, we can expect 0.94 MATIC. Bear in mind that the price of MATIC can still fluctuate during this time. In other words, we should still earn our 0.94 MATIC by the end of the week. But that doesn’t mean that our investment will hold the same USD value as it did when we invested.
Trade History
To see your trade history, we need to navigate to “Orders”. This is situated at the top right of the screen and then click on “spot order”. Obviously, if you were Margin trading, you would click on Margin Order. In this section, you should also be able to view the history of your credit card purchases, as well as your staking history.
Binance Order History
On the next screen, we should then be able to view our MATIC buy order history. The tab will show the time and date of the order and the average price ($1.40) per token. You will also be able to see the amount of MATIC bought and the total amount of the token we traded with. Which in this case was USDT199.31748.
Binance Mobile Application
Binance, being the largest crypto exchange in the world, obviously offers the full suite of mobile apps. You can download the app from the App Store or Google Play. The app offers most of the same functionality as its desktop counterpart. It has a rating of 4.7 stars on the Apple App Store.
Within the app, we have a plethora of options on the Home screen. Including being able to buy crypto from our credit card. But the main option tabs at the bottom gives us access to a lot more. This includes Wallet, Trade, Markets as well as Futures trading. Once inside the wallet tab, we will be taken to our spot wallet. Here we can see our balance of recently deposited BTC.
Binance Mobile Spot Wallet
But, we also have the option of clicking on the “Earn” tab at the top. This will take us to our savings and investments section. We can now see the 142 MATIC that we have been staking for a few days now. As you can see, we are also staking some ADA (Cardano). If we drill down on MATIC, we will be presented with a screen that now shows us that we have accrued 0.4 MATIC during the last 3 days of staking.
Binance Mobile Earn
Speaking of deposits, we also have the option to either withdraw or deposit crypto right from the app itself.
If we choose to click on the “Markets” tab, we will once again be taken to a trading screen. Here we are presented with the same option to be able to limit or market order buy crypto pairs.
Binance Mobile Trade
Binance Extras
BNB Token
In this next section, we will be taking a closer look at the BNB token, itself. Basically, Binance Coin (BNB), was issued by the Binance exchange in 2017. Its use case, to be a utility token with the purpose of reducing trading fees on Binance. The use case for the BNB token has since expanded. BNB has now grown to the number 4 most valuable coin of all. With a market cap of just over $39B as of this writing.
The BNB token is now not only just used to reduce trading fees but also for DeFi (Decentralized Finance) services. This essentially means you can use BNB tokens as Gas. Gas is essentially the fee on the BSC (Binance Smart Chain) Network. BNB was originally built on the Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token. However, it has since become the native coin of the Binance Chain (BEP-20). The BNB token was trading at under $40 at the start of 2021. It has now sky-rocketed to $288.80, boasting an ATH (All Time High) of $686 on May 10th.
Binance Coin (BNB)
The Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
Before we get into BSC, we first need to start off with Binance Chain. The Binance Chain was created to host and facilitate transactions on the Binance DEX (explained below). The Binance Chain does not facilitate smart contracts like Ethereum does. This was done on purpose so that the chain would not become as congested as the Ethereum network.
Binance then, however, decided to scale the chain by creating and running the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) side-by-side or in parallel with the Binance chain. The BSC network does support smart contracts where developers can build apps and cryptocurrencies. The mainnet offers BNB staking and DeFi tools available for developers.
BSC and Binance Smart Chain Wallet
To understand all of this, you really need to make use of the BNB Token on the BSC network. In this example, we will connect it to a DEX and swap or exchange some coins. I am briefly going to show you how the BNB token is used in a DeFi dApp such as Pancakeswap. Pancakeswap is a DEX or Decentralized Exchange running on the BSC network.
You can navigate to the Pancakswap Dex, and connect your web extension wallet. Binance has its own wallet extension, called the Binance Chain Wallet. I would mostly recommend using the Metamask wallet for this type of thing. In this case, I have connected my BSC wallet to the DEX just for illustrative purposes.
Firstly, you need to download and instal the BSC wallet extension here. Next, you will need to click “Connect” in the top right-hand corner of the screen to authorise the wallet to connect to the DEX. You will now be able to exchange coins for one another on the BSC network.
Binance Chain Wallet with Pancakeswap DEX
Would you like to know more about using a web wallet with a DEX? Take a look at our extensive Metamask how-to here.
The Binance Launchpad
What is a launchpad? A Crypto launchpad is defined as a vehicle that allows early-stage investors access to yet to be launched tokens or crypto projects before they go mainstream. As they say, whoever gets in early, wins! One usually has to hold an allocation of the native launchpad tokens to be able to participate in presales. Sometimes as is the case with Binance, it’s even just a lottery. Holding native launchpad tokens does not guarantee you access to the pre-sale. It merely means that you stand a chance to participate.
Binance Launchpad
The Binance launchpad is no different. According to Binance, the Launchpad is “a significant part of our holistic support when it comes to supporting blockchain startups”. As with ICO’s (Initial Coin Offering) in the early days, this is now considered the new way to raise capital for a crypto startup. Binance refers to this as its IEO model (Initial Exchange Offering).
The launchpad basically operates on a lottery system. And you need to hold at least 100 BNB to get in. As of this writing, that’s $28,800. Again, it’s all about being early. If you got in during last year, that would have been sub 4K. I personally was afforded the opportunity to get in on a Cardano launchpad called OCCAM Finance, for just under $1,500.
See the screenshot below for how the allocations work. The amount of BNB tokens you hold for at least a 20 day period, determine the number of lottery tickets you get, to participate in the next IEO.
Binance Launchpad Lottery Allocations
The Binance Card
Binance does offer a Crypto Debit card enabling users to draw down on their crypto holdings by swiping the card at any VISA speed point. It converts crypto into fiat at the point of sale at the current spot price. The Binance Visa Card supports payment using BTC, BNB, ETH SXP and BUSD. Unfortunately, the card is still not available in my country, otherwise, I would have “reviewed” the crap out of it!
Binance Crypto Debit Card
Conclusion
Shortcode
Wow, that was quite a mouth full! I am confident that you should now be better equipped to take on the world of crypto. Especially this Exchange of all exchanges called Binance. Personally, I use Binance almost on a daily basis. The fact that they offer so many trading pairs and offer access to such a variety of people from all over the world truly makes them the largest cryptocurrency exchange on the planet.
Remember, Binance is a CeFi exchange and your funds or tokens are best not to be stored there indefinitely. You should always move funds that are not in use, off of the exchanges and into a secure wallet. After all, as the old crypto saying goes — not your keys, not your coins. If you are wondering which is the safest and most secure crypto wallet, look no further than the Trezor Model T.
To wrap it up, Binance is a solid option for most when starting out in the crypto world. Heck, even for seasoned crypto users a Binance account is a must. Remember that if you are based in the USA you need to check out Binance US, or alternatively try out Coinbase.
I appreciate you sticking around until the end. Have a good one, Cheers!
