Quick recap on why to use Coinbase Pro and not Coinbase — avoid the fees and spread, and set up limit orders on your terms.

If you have a Coinbase account, you also have a Coinbase Pro account. You can sign up here: https://www.coinbase.com/join/wesalo_i.

While Coinbase Pro looks a bit more intimidating and is harder to use, it’s pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it. The advantages are that you will pay way less for the same coin. This is because Coinbase has:

• Much higher fees.
• Markups on price when you’re buying and markdowns when you’re selling. This is called a “spread,” because they are spreading about a percent between the actual market price and the price they are giving you.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a buy order for ANKR set up on Coinbase (left) and Coinbase Pro (right) the other day.

For your $50, Coinbase will give you 318.4 ANKR tokens, but Pro will give you 332. Over 4% less! This is because you are facing a $2 fee vs $0.25 fee, and they are charging $0.1508 per coin vs $0.14991 per coin on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro, respectively!

What if you want to sell? Well, here’s a Tezos (XTZ) sale from today. If I sell the same amount of Tezos, I can get $150.96 from Coinbase, or $153.93 from Pro — 2% more from Pro! This is because the fee is $3 on Coinbase vs $0.77 on Pro, and coin is being sold for $4.61 on Coinbase and $4.6394 on Pro for a nearly 3-cent spread.

The last advantage I’ll mention with Pro is being able to put in Limit orders. Limit orders let you set a price, unlike Market where you take what you can get. With market, you are hoping that the price doesn’t suddenly jump up when you click the button. Limit orders let you set the price a bit below where it’s currently being bought, or a bit above where it’s currently being sold. Depending on how much higher/lower you go, it’ll generally “jitter” up or down to your limit pretty quickly, and you’ll get your order filled on your terms. You can also set up these orders as a “set it and forget it” buy or sell, so the exchange will automatically buy or sell once it hits your price target.

For a few coins that earn interest, however, only Coinbase pays interest. These include XTZ, USDC, and ATOM. So after you buy these (preferably on Coinbase Pro), use Withdraw to instantly move them to Coinbase for free. Note that you can generally get higher interest yields on other platforms.

All in all, if you are one of the very many people who trades on Coinbase, you should simply move over to Coinbase Pro for your trading. You already have an account if you’re signed up for Coinbase — just go to pro.coinbase.com. And here’s a referral link to sign up for Coinbase if you’re interested: https://www.coinbase.com/join/wesalo_i