Trading Lumens on Kraken - a review
Because I love contests and because I don’t have any noteworthy skills or knowledge, I decided to write a short review on trading XLM on Kraken.
Kraken is my favorite exchange for most cryptocurrencies. Their interface is very intuitive. Exactly what I need as I can be a bit of a moron at times and I hate searching through interfaces for functions that I don’t end up finding (ahum.. Poloniex).
So, to buy Lumens, you will need to fund your Kraken account with USD, EUR or Bitcoin, as Lumens are only traded against those three currencies at Kraken. (I just had a bunch of Ether myself so I had to sell some ETH against USD and buy XLM with the fresh USD). The supply and demand vary quite a bit in those three currencies, USD being the least populated for some reason.
Funding your account is really simple, either send any supported cryptocurrency to a custom hash for your account and find the currency added within 15 minutes, or send an oldschool wire transfer and pray to all that’s holy that your money doesn’t end up in someone else’s account. I went with the first option so I can’t tell you if praying really works or not.
It’s probably a good idea to use the XLM/EUR and XLM/XBT exchanges if you’re buying a large quantity. I bought 250,000 XLM with USD but as there was little supply at the market price point, I had to wait about an hour before my order was completed. It would have been much faster had I been buying with EUR or Bitcoin. Obviously I didn’t check until I already sold my Ether for USD and placed the buy order for Lumens. Please don’t ask me why I would even check afterwards, as it clearly doesn’t make any difference to do so. Some other crypto’s like XRP/Ripple can only be traded against Bitcoin, so trading Lumens is quite convenient compared to some other (obviously inferior) currencies like Ripple. If you’re not a complete retard like myself obviously.
Playing with limit orders is really easy on Kraken. They offer the option to set more detailed orders such as time limits, leverage (actually leverage is not available on XLM yet, but it is on most other currencies and I reckon it will probably become available at some time in the future) and scheduled orders. They offer an API for your automated scripting needs too. I usually just place basic limit orders, so all that hard work is totally lost on me. Thanks for the effort tho, Kraken. It’s nice to know it’s there even if you don’t need it. It feels kind of like the orange window hammer thingy in the car.
Fees are quite acceptable, they get lower as you trade more. After the first $50,000 USD worth of transactions, the fee level drops from $0.18/0.28% to $0.16/0.26%. Another $50k worth of transactions and you’re at $0.14/0.14%. By that trend they will be paying you to trade on their platform once you hit $500k in transactions. I’m trying to find out for you guys, will update once the thread I hit the $500k. Donations to help accomplish this noble task are of course welcome (GB6SLB5E3HRHRK3OOMR2CY2YSYNUB52ZSLOAHIKWIVTZ5HO6PYTOG3AF).
All in all, Kraken is a great platform for the beginning crypto trader. Especially if you’re just looking to buy and hold some Lumens instead of day-trading the c#@! out of them, Kraken is highly recommended! Zero skills or knowledge required, even I managed to figure it out.
Now if only I hadn’t sold my 250,000 Lumens at $0.014 each..
