The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Binance Exchange: Buy/Sell Cryptocurrency

Rusty Shackleford
5 min readDec 19, 2017
Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

So you’ve decided to step into the world of cryptocurrency. You’ve bought your first Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) or Litecoin (LTC) on Coinbase (Many people will refer to these as the Big Three), and now you have friends talking about XVG, NEO, OMG, WTC etc. Coins such as these are what we refer to as altcoins. Unlike the big three most of these coins cannot be bought on Coinbase. They need to be bought on different exchanges. My personal favorite exchange is Binance. Binance is a secure exchange that many people use, I like that Binance fees are halved because they have their own currency Binance coin(BNB) which will when used to pay your transaction fee will cut your fee in half! The guide below will explain just that.

REGISTRATION

To register for Binance use the link below. My referral link is there and I would appreciate it, if you used it.

https://www.binance.com/?ref=10793577

After clicking the link you will be taken to this page.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

Click on the register button and fill out all your information. Click register button and check click on the confirmation e-mail sent to you.

THIS NEXT PART IS IMPORTANT TO PROTECTING YOUR FUNDS AND INVESTMENT.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

2FA or Two factor Authentification basically adds another level of security in addition to your password. So even if someone hacks your password unless they also have the Google Authenticator code from the app they cannot log in. In addition to being the more secure option, Google Authenticator is the only one available for those of us not in Mainland China.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

Open your Google Authenticator app and hit the red + button below then scan the QR code on your screen and enter the 2FA code given to you from the app. Congratulations you’re now protected!

Image screenshot from Google Auth app

Transferring over coins from Coinbase

Now that you have Binance set up, you need to transfer your funds from Coinbase (I will be using Ethereum as an example).

  1. Log in to Coinbase and go to accounts as seen below
Image screenshot from Coinbase

2. Click on Send. Now you will see this

Image screenshot from Coinbase

3. Go to your Binance account and go to Funds then Deposits and Withdrawals (This is also how you check your coin balances in the future).

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

4. Search for the coin you are trying to deposit (Ethereum in our case) and click.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

5. Copy and paste the ETH Deposit Address into the Recipient box in Coinbase and enter how much ETH/USD you want to send and click continue… Your Ethereum is now en-route to the Binance exchange (Depending on network congestion, this could take a while, although usually with Ethereum transaction times are shorter).

Image screenshot from Coinbase

Trading

Once the incoming Ethereum hits your Binance account, you are now ready to start trading! Go to the Exchange tab and click Basic and you should see the screen below. Don’t worry about all those numbers and figures! They may seem very over whelming but for the purposes of this guide we will be ignoring them.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

Like FOREX trading Cryptocurrency is traded in pairs. It will always be ETH/BTC, BTC/XVG, BTC/WTC, etc. Most coins are traded against BTC although some also support ETH and LTC.

For our example I will be using the coin XVG.

Searching for the coin

  1. Click on the ETH tab on the right side (highlighted below and search for XVG)
  2. Click on the XVG/ETH link which will take you to the page below (You can also click the star next to the XVG/ETH pair which will add it to your favorites (This prioritizes it and puts it at the top whenever you open your exchange tab in the future).
Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

Buying the coin

  1. Go to Market
  2. Set the desired amount (number of coins or total percentage of your ETH balance are your two options)
  3. Click Buy XVG
Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

CONGRATULATIONS you now know how to purchase alt coins using ETH.

But what if the altcoin doesn’t take ETH as a pairing? We then need to exchange our ETH to BTC and then we can go about trading as usual again. In order to do this we need to this time click on the BTC tab which is right next to the ETH one we clicked earlier.

Exchanging alt coins to BTC

  1. Click the BTC tab next to the ETH tab we used earlier.
  2. Search for ETH
  3. Click on ETH/BTC pairing
Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

Selling your ETH for BTC

1. Click on Market.

2. Enter amount of ETH or percentage of your total ETH balance you wish to sell.

3. Click on Sell ETH.

Image screenshot from Binance Exchange

4 . $$$

Now you can buy altcoins that don’t take the ETH pairing! (All altcoins can be bought with BTC to my knowledge). Welcome to the world of Crypto and as always, happy trading!

**If my guide helped you at all and you want to tip me :) feel free to in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin. My addresses are below!

BTC: 1FBLDewswSZfsE7LVU9rUqRbyhu1DPJv1f

BCH: 1NYLhkjnvxYydZ9T9vRyGVKqyUEpEHX1J4

ETH: 0x2C4D91f52da6815451A9Aa40A49815354cF7c8d1

LTC: LbwLGjiwN1YP7YaEzmScT2RrYqwt6v8EPn

Thanks for reading!

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Rusty Shackleford

Statistician by trade, crypto-enthusiast at heart welcoming new comers to the world of crypto with open arms.