What a crypto exchange is

In the world of cryptocurrencies, one of the most important things to an investor is having the ability to buy or trade coins at any time. Whether it be the chance to strike it big on a coin or the opportunity to buy and sell whenever you please, there needs to be a service that allows this to happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is the job of an exchange. An exchange is a place where financial instruments like stocks or commodities are traded. In the traditional financial markets, some examples of exchanges are the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. Because of the trading that occurs 24/7 in crypto, there need to be places where investors can go anytime of the day, with the certainty their requests will be taken care of. On an exchange, you can either buy crypto with fiat currency or convert coins from one to the other - a feature unique to the world of cryptocurrencies. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of coins that are currently on the market. Due to the rapid pace that coins are created and traded, not all of them will be available on any given exchange - coingecko is a good place to check which exchange each coin is traded on. Some examples of centralised crypto exchanges are Coinbase, Binance, FTX and Kraken. While all of these are fairly similar, there are advantages and disadvantages inherent to each one. This is primarily due to the rambunctious nature of the crypto markets, as certain investing styles are more suitable to different exchanges. For example, Bybit offers leverage trading, while Coinbase offers both a simple buy/sell interface, as well as market and limit orders. While centralised exchanges might be best for most users, there are also decentralised exchanges for those who wish to dive a little bit deeper into crypto. Some examples of these are Uniswap, Sushiswap and 1inch.