Well not all but almost all its features will not be available to Singapore customers. And those are the features that most of us care about anyway, so might as well be closing its doors to us. I am not too sure what actually spark all these but looks like it is coming from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Previously Binance has stopped P2P trading for its customers in Singapore, so you cannot trade in SGD. It was so convenient to do P2P trading. Basically it is direct trading with others in the platform and you directly transfer funds to their bank accounts and you get cryptos in your wallet or vice versa. But now it has turned into blocking nearly all the features in Binance. Do note that this will begin somewhere in late December. So if you have crypto still stashed in Binance, you might want to transfer them out to other platform or Exchanges. However it is kind of ironic that Binance SG has been granted special permission to do crypto trading with Singapore customers. Yet again I am not too sure why MAS is targeting Binance International (Binance.com) as they have been operating for quite some time with Singapore customers without any major issues. Something does not sound right here.
For me, I store a good portion of my crypto portfolio in Nexo and Hi Dollar Earnings. Nexo seems to be giving me better returns compared to the other lending platforms. Although they recently added DOGECOIN into their platform but I have not seen any other platforms with higher interests for my XRP. And Nexo makes it much easier to swap cryptos as they have their own exchange feature. Sure, it is still rather limited but it is better than nothing. As for Hi Dollars, I am rather bullish about this new project, so I threw some funds into it. And their earnings feature has just been launched and is giving up to 40% APY. That is quite a return if the APY remains the same. But of course there are some risks as it is a very young project without the kind of popularity as other crypto platforms. But everything starts small right? And I think they do have some financial muscle behind the project. Hey, they own Hi.com domain name. That is one very expensive domain name.
As for other exchanges I am looking at Kucoin. The interface looks very much like Binance’s so users of Binance should be quite at ease at Kucoin. And Kucoin has good support for various types of altcoins. Some of whom are not even listed in Binance. Which to me, I think is a good thing. I want variety in my options. They do have limited support for staking and earnings. But of course nothing to the scale of Binance. The other exchange would be Huboi Global. One of the features that got me interested is that they have P2P trading in SGD as well. It is just so convenient to trade using P2P – all it takes is 15 minutes and you have your crypto or your funds in your bank. All those bank transfers from your account to the platform’s bank account and whatever verification for which account, you can skip all that. Yes, there are some risks involved but if you are careful, it should be fine. Even doing traditional bank transfers have their own risks and can come with plenty of frustrations if you don’t do it right. However as for other fees and charges, I am not too sure. I will do more research and get back to you guys. But from what I know, Huboi is quite a large crypto exchange.
Oh I am no financial advisor. Please do your own research on which platform you want to use and which is the best option for your trading style. Take care and stay strong. And of course here is to hoping that MAS will allow Binance to start their operations in Singapore again.
