In this article, we review and rank the best crypto futures exchanges based on their features and reputation. We tested numerous options ourselves to make a complete list of platforms catering to different experience levels and risk appetites.
Whether its extreme leverage up to 1000x, low fees, sophisticated grid bots, or precise risk controls, these top platforms for crypto futures trading offer unique advantages that meet the unique requirements of different traders.
CoinFutures stood out as the only gamified futures trading solution available on the market. However, if you’re a seasoned trader seeking advanced automation tools or a extensive range of contracts, other platforms on our list might be a better fit.
Best Crypto Futures Exchange at a Glance
After reviewing and analyzing dozens of crypto futures exchanges, from Tier-1 platforms like Binance to lesser-known options with low trading volumes yet some unique features, here is our top list:
- CoinFutures – Gamified futures trading with 1000x leverage & no KYC
- Bybit – Unified account with advanced automation tools for day traders
- Binance – Rewards and exceptional liquidity for professional high-volume traders
- MEXC – 500x leverage & daily competitions for risk-on traders
- Pionex Futures – Fully automated trading with free bots & proprietary strategies
- BingX – Guaranteed zero slippage and liquidation protection for risk-averse traders
Top 6 Crypto Futures Trading Platforms Reviewed
Let’s dive into detailed reviews of all the exchanges we’ve tested. We break down the features of these platforms and what makes them stand out.
1. CoinFutures – Gamified Futures Trading with 1000x Leverage & No KYC
Fees: Flat fee (1%-3% per wager) or profit-based fee (<5% of profits)
Standout features: Gamified interface with trading simulation
CoinFutures isn’t your traditional crypto futures trading platform. It gamifies the process, eliminating the tedious KYC required by all major exchanges and wallet management, to lower the barrier to entry. If you don’t yet have any experience with crypto derivatives, CoinFutures might be your best bet.
All you need to get started is your email address. You won’t trade actual futures contracts but rather bet on their price movements in simulated market conditions that mirror the actual situation.
Perhaps the biggest CoinFutures’ appeal is its clean interface, as inexperienced traders often find traditional platforms like Binance overwhelming. It operates through the CoinPoker app, one of the most popular gaming platforms around. You can access all CoinPoker games and CoinFutures with the same account.
Because CoinFutures caters to new traders, it has a limited selection of futures contracts, focusing on $BTC and best altcoins like $ETH and $DOGE. This is partly because it offers extreme leverage of up to 1000x. Betting on major cryptos reduces your risk of liquidation when using aggressive leverage.
And since you don’t trade actual futures, there are no maker and taker fees. Instead, CoinFutures implements a flat or profit-based fee where you only pay when you win. While the fee structure is simple and beneficial when you lose, fees are quite high – up to 5% of your profit or 1%-3% per wager.
CoinPoker operates under a Comoros license, and so does CoinFutures as its subsidiary. While this means that US traders don’t get all the same protections as on top regulated crypto exchanges, CoinFutures maintains 100% user fund reserves and regularly publishes reserve data publicly.
2. Bybit – Unified Account with Advanced Automation Tools for Day Traders
Fees: 0.01% maker fee, 0.06% taker fee
Standout features: UTA, Chase Limit Order, Futures Grid Bot
Bybit gained popularity among traders due to its wide range of futures contracts, advanced tools, and competitive futures trading fees of 0.06% for takers and just 0.01% for makers.
One of the key strengths that stood out to us was Bybit’s high-performance trading engine, capable of processing a large number of orders with minimal slippage, something that we have seen many other smaller platforms have problems with. This makes it the best crypto exchange for day trading strategies such as scalping on our list.
Bybit boasts plenty of crypto futures contracts, including major ones like BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT and lower-cap coin contracts like GALAUSDT and IMXUSDT. You can even bet on the price of newer listings, such as $WLFI and $MITO. Bybit offers both USDT-margined and coin-margined contracts.
Major coin contracts come with up to 100x leverage, while some altcoin contracts only allow for 50x.
Another important factor is that Bybit supports several futures contract types, such as inverse contracts (allowing you to use the underlying assets as both collateral and settlement currency) and perpetual contracts (enabling you to hold positions indefinitely without any expiration dates).
When it comes to automation, Bybit has few to no competitors. For example, the Chase Limit Order adjusts limit order prices to secure the best bid or ask, and the Futures Grid Bot executes buy low, sell high strategies. If you’re new to futures, you’ll appreciate Bybit’s Copy Trading Bot that follows proven strategies of traders with an over 75% win rate.
With Bybit’s Unified Trading Account (UTA), you can trade on spot, futures, and options markets with a single account balance, so there’s no need to move collateral around when an opportunity arises. The Portfolio Margin Mode is particularly useful as it doesn’t treat each position in isolation but calculates margin requirements based on the risk to your entire portfolio.
The last thing that we want to highlight is Bybit’s risk management system. It includes a sophisticated insurance fund and a flexible liquidation mechanism, designed to minimize the impact of market volatility.
3. Binance – Rewards and Exceptional Liquidity for Professional High-Volume Traders
Fees: 0.018% maker fee, 0.045% taker fee (lower for VIPs)
Standout features: NEXT prediction rewards campaign
Binance is one of the best altcoin futures exchanges thanks to its large contract variety. Apart from the usual contracts like BTCUSDT, Binance constantly adds new listings like PWNGUUSDT, MLNUSDT, and CVXUSDT, often with 50x-75x leverage.
Many of the tokens that initially launch on the pre-listing discovery platform Binance Alpha get a spot on Binance’s futures market the same day. One such example is the Balance ($ETP) token. For this reason, Binance is the go-to exchange for traders seeking fresh opportunities.
The exchange supports both perpetual futures contracts and traditional futures contracts with fixed expiry dates. It’s also ideal for high-volume trading due to a tiered fee structure: taker fees start at 0.045% and can go as low as 0.0153%, while makes fees start at 0.018% and can go to zero the more you trade. All $USDC-margined contracts have a 0% maker fee.
Another key advantage of Binance is high liquidity. With a large user base and extensive trading volumes, Binance makes sure that traders can enter and exit positions swiftly without significant slippage, even with large orders.
Like a top crypto platform should, Binance offers advanced tools for professional futures traders. These include various order types, rewards for correctly predicting upcoming futures listings (Futures NEXT program), and a bot that executes large orders as smaller ones at regular intervals to reduce slippage.
Thanks to the Portfolio Margin Pro tool, you can combine your funds from USDT-margined and coin-margined wallets for bigger trades.
Additionally, Binance made it to our best crypto exchange for futures trading list because it provides great charting tools, technical analysis indicators, and real-time market data, something that we found very helpful during our testing of the platform.
4. MEXC – 500x Leverage & Daily Competitions for Risk-On Traders
Fees: 0% maker fee, 0.02% taker fee (0% on some contracts)
Standout features: Trading competitions, 1.4M orders/second engine
MEXC may not be the largest crypto exchange, serving 30M user versus Binance’s 280M, but it offers up to 500x leverage and zero taker fees for select futures contracts.
This limited-time promotion applies to 160+ contracts out of the 1,200+ contracts based on 824 asset pairs available on the platform overall. However, regular fees are also competitive: just 0.02% for takers and 0% for makers.
It’s worth noting that you can only use 500x leverage for major USDT-margined contracts like BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT. Less popular contracts, like DOGEUSDT, may offer up to 250x leverage. Meanwhile, coin-margined contracts offer up to 200x leverage, which is still higher than most competitors.
Currently, MEXC runs the Futures Leaderboard competition with a 15K $USDT prize pool for daily ranking and a 80K $USDT pool for monthly winners. The leaderboard shows that the daily winner received 750 $USDT, which is a nice bonus on top of everything they’ve made from their trades.
MEXC also boasts an advanced trading engine, capable of matching up to 1.4M orders per second. This secures quick order execution and reduces the risk of slippage, providing traders with an experience that many other similar platforms simply don’t offer.
This year, MEXC obtained an operational license from the FCA in the UK but doesn’t have a valid license in the US, which means US traders can’t access the platform and is a major reason MEXC doesn’t rank higher on our list.
Still, the platform takes security seriously, maintaining a $100M protection fund to cover losses from hacks and a $559M insurance fund to compensate traders during forced liquidations. MEXC also regularly published Proof of Reserves data that shows it backs all of its user assets.
5. Pionex – Fully Automated Trading with Free Bots & Proprietary Strategies
Fees: 0.02% maker fee, 0.05% taker fee (lower for VIPs)
Standout features: 16 free bots for fully automated trading
Pionex focuses on fully automated futures trading. Its grid trading bots execute strategies 24/7 in Long (bullish), Short (bearish), or Neutral (for sideways markets) modes with up to 100x leverage. You can’t trade futures manually on Pionex, but you can on the spot market.
The trading bots are free, so there’s no upfront investment other than your margin. Like on any futures platform, you’ll also pay trading fees: 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker, yet they get lower for VIP users who reach 30-day trading volumes of at least 15 $BTC or equivalent.
Pionex’s two-layer buffer system also helps you avoid unnecessary losses during high volatility periods. While most exchanges will force-close your order if you don’t meet margin requirements, Pionex will temporarily reduce your active orders. If the market rebounds or you add funds shortly after, it will restore your orders.
Besides, grid bots allow for complex strategies. The Futures Moon Bot can execute over 200 daily trades with ultra-dense orders to profit from very small price movements, a strategy called arbitrage. This bot also benefits from 0% fees, which increases your profits.
For beginners, Pionex offers a Copy Bot that lets you duplicate parameters other traders use for their bots. The main difference with traditional copy trading offered by other platforms is that you can’t select a bot to copy based on its performance. You can only copy newly created bots and not running ones.
Lastly, the Futures-Spot Arbitrage strategy takes advantage of price differences on the futures and spot markets to generate steady returns. It buys crypto on the spot market, then opens an equivalent short position on the futures market and earns funding fees from that position.
6. BingX – Guaranteed Zero Slippage and Liquidation Protection for Risk-Averse Traders
Fees: 0.02% maker fee, 0.05% taker fee for perpetual futures; 0.045% when closing a position for standard futures
Standout features: Guaranteed zero slippage, pre-launch futures
BingX‘s standout feature is the Guaranteed Price mechanism. Even on the largest platforms with exceptional liquidity, slippage may occur, especially for less popular contracts. BingX guarantees to execute your order at the present price with zero slippage, which is possible because the platform covers slippage on your behalf.
The platform also uses a dual price mechanism to protect your positions from liquidations. Without getting into technicalities, it prevents mass liquidations due to sharp dips by evaluating the underlying asset using the real-time global market price and the last price on BingX’s order book instead of a single price point.
Experienced traders will like the Trigger Reverse feature, exclusive to BingX. It lets you set a price at which your position will automatically reverse (from long to short and vice versa). It’s particularly useful when an asset has well-defined historical support and resistance points.
Apart from the 150+ futures trading pairs listed on BingX, you can trade ‘pre-launch futures’ – essentially, synthetic contracts where you bet on the price of a token that’s not yet available on exchanges. The maximum leverage here is 5x, unlike the regular futures market where BingX offers up to 125x leverage.
Similar to Bybit’s UTA, Bing’x Wealth as Margin lets you use $USDT from your other balances (savings accounts) as margin. Notably, your $USDT will continue to accrue interest unless your position is liquidated.
Beyond crypto futures, BingX offers futures contracts for stocks of US companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Apple, which is a good option if you want to diversify your portfolio.
How to Choose a Crypto Futures Trading Platform
When selecting a crypto futures trading platform, there are many factors to consider.
First and foremost, evaluate the platform’s reliability and security measures. Look for exchanges that have a solid track record and security measures, such as cold storage for reserve funds and two-factor authentication.
Another important aspect to consider is the range of contracts. The best crypto futures exchange should offer a diverse selection of contracts for different cryptocurrencies, including major ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as smaller altcoins.
Liquidity, too, plays a vital role in futures trading. Opt for exchanges that have strong trading volumes and a healthy order book depth to ensure easy execution of trades at desired prices. A highly liquid market reduces the risk of slippage and enhances trading efficiency.
Lastly, consider the user interface and unique tools offered by the platform. A user-friendly interface with intuitive navigation and comprehensive charting tools can greatly enhance your experience. Advanced features like grid bots and liquidation protection are also valuable for executing effective trading strategies.
How to Start Trading Crypto Futures
Signing up and placing your first trade on a crypto futures platform is typically straightforward. However, most platforms require you to pass KYC verification. For a smooth first-time experience, we recommend CoinFutures.
Here are the steps you should follow to get started.
Step 1 – Create a CoinFutures Account
Visit the official CoinFutures website and click on Register Now. Then, enter your email and create a nickname and a strong password. Agree to Terms & Conditions and click on Register.
Step 2 – Download the CoinPoker App
CoinFutures operates through the CoinPoker interface, so you’ll need to download the app, available on Windows, macOS, and Android (iOS app is in the works). Once downloaded, sign in with your CoinFutures credentials.
Step 3 – Fund Your Account
Open the app and click on the Balance icon on the top right to fund your account with your preferred cryptocurrency.
Step 4 – Place Your Wager
Click on Crypto Futures within the CoinPoker interface. There, click on the contract name in the upper left corner to expand the menu and select your preferred contract. On the right, enter your wager amount, choose the direction (up or down), and set the multiplier (leverage). Click on Place Bet to confirm.
That’s it – there are no complex risk controls, and you can track your position on the chart. Use the same panel on the right to exit your trade when the time is right.
How Does Crypto Futures Trading Work?
Crypto futures trading involves speculating on the future price movements of cryptocurrencies through the use of derivatives contracts.
These contracts are agreements to buy or sell a particular cryptocurrency at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future, except for when you use perpetual contracts. Perpetual contracts don’t have an expiration time, so you can hold them indefinitely.
The profit or loss in futures trading is determined by the price difference between the contract’s entry and exit points. If you go long and the price of a crypto increases, you make a profit; if it decreases, you incur a loss. Conversely, if you go short and the price falls, you profit, but if it goes up, you lose money.
Leverage is the tool that lets you amplify exposure to the market by borrowing funds from the exchange. Essentially, it enables you to control a larger position size with a smaller capital. Say, if you only have $100 on your balance, you can use 2x leverage to open a $200x position.
It’s important to note that crypto futures trading is highly speculative and involves risks. You should thoroughly understand market dynamics, employ appropriate risk management strategies, and stay updated on market news and trends to make informed decisions.
Top Crypto Futures Trading Strategies
Here are some of the most popular futures trading strategies you may pick depending on market conditions and the underlying asset.
- Trend following: This strategy involves identifying and trading in the direction of the prevailing trend. Analyze the price charts and use technical indicators to confirm the trend’s strength before entering a position. This is best suited for long-term crypto futures traders.
- Mean reversion: This strategy assumes that prices will eventually revert to their average (mean) levels after deviating from them. Traders look for overextended price moves and take positions to profit from the expected price correction.
- Breakout trading: Traders using this strategy aim to capitalize on significant price movements occurring after a period of consolidation or range-bound trading. Enter positions when prices break above or below key support or resistance levels.
- Scalping: Scalpers aim to profit from short-term price fluctuations by executing multiple quick trades. They capitalize on small price differentials and rely on high trading volume and liquidity to enter and exit trades rapidly.
- Hedging: Hedging strategies involve opening positions to mitigate potential losses from adverse price movements. Traders take offsetting positions in the futures market to protect their existing cryptocurrency holdings.
Conclusion
CoinFutures takes the top spot on our list as it’s the only platform that makes crypto futures trading feel like a game while offering 1000x leverage. No KYC and a clean interface earn CoinFutures serious bonus points in comparison with traditional platforms.
However, if you seek advanced tools like order automation, liquidation protection, risk controls, and copy trading, exchanges like Binance and Bybit are also worth exploring. Pionex has no alternatives when it comes to fully automated trading, and MEXC boasts the lowest fees in the industry.
No matter the platform you choose, remember that futures trading is a high-risk endeavor, particularly if you use leverage. Only trade with money you can afford to lose and do your own research.
FAQs
Which crypto futures exchange has the lowest futures trading fees?
MEXC has the lowest fees on the market, with a 0% maker fee on all contracts and a 0% taker fee on select contracts. Some contracts require you to pay a 0.02% taker fee, which is still well below the industry average.
Is crypto futures trading profitable?
Crypto futures trading can be profitable, but it also carries risks. Profits depend on accurate predictions of price movements and effective trading strategies. Leverage can amplify your profits, but it can also amplify losses, so use it with caution.
What is the best Binance futures alternative?
Some popular alternatives to Binance futures include Bybit, MEXC, and CoinFutures. Bybit offers excellent automation tools, MEXC has the highest leverage on the market, and CoinFutures is well-suited for beginners overwhelmed by complex trading interfaces or those who want to avoid KYC.
