Some of you might have heard, but Binance has been the target of quite a few countries. Most recently, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (the Monetary Regulatory of Singapore, “MAS”) whacked Binance, and Singapore users has been informed that as of 26 October 2021, Singapore users will have severely restricted functions they can use in binance.com, their main website.
While Binance offers an alternative under Binance Singapore (binance.sg), it is far worse than the original binance.com which we are so used to using. Binance Singapore has limited coins offering – 8 in total, which is a pathetic number. Not only that, any money flowing in will have to go through a company licenced by the MAS. The money you can put in and withdraw is also severely limited and monitored. While I am not a die-hard crypto idealist who will say the whole idea of crypto is decentralisation and a move away from the Government, the severely limited coin offerings, funds inflow and outflow, the horrible spread and the exorbitant transaction fee of 0.6% is a huge turn-off.
After some discussion with friends, we narrowed down to either Huobi or Okex. I will not go into the Huobi or Okex review here, but I have decided to go with Okex. Main reason being its lower trading fees compared to Huobi and its exemption granted by MAS. One can only wonder what terms and conditions Okex has to meet to qualify for an exemption, but I will not speculate here. Either way I am not doing any illegal activities, but conduct my legit business and trading using crypto. Huobi has more coins but I generally do not play with shitcoins, and even if I want to, I will only put in very little amount of money. For that, I also created an account in Huobi for small trading of shitcoins which I cannot find in Okex.
Sad to say, neither Okex nor Huobi is as comprehensive and good as Binance, but since that is the result of that, I had sold all my holdings, converted them to USDT, sent them over to Okex and then bought back whatever I need to. Originally I was 50% in BTC, 30% in ETH, 20% in LINK. However in Okex, to keep things simple, I only bought BTC and set a queue at DOT, ETH, LINK at a lower ALT/BTC price. Well as of now ETH and LINK went up against the BTC, making me feel a little regret.
As of now I am 10923 USDT in BTC at an average price of 43038 USDT per BTC. The current price now is 47668 USDT per BTC. I also have a 1000 USDT holdings in PEARL in Huobi.
One concern I had when moving to Okex was the fact that my base currency had to be in USDT. In Binance I had used BUSD because I do not believe much in USDT. You may have heard a lot of negative reviews on USDT, on how the USDT in circulation is not backed by the amount of money they had etc. I will not go into this yet, but using USDT does worry me a little. Let us see how it goes from here.
