Liquid – Cryptocurrency Exchange Volume and Information

Liquid is a crypto exchange that launched in January 2014. It has offices in Singapore but is actually regulated and licensed by the Japanese FSA (Financial Supervisory Authority). The platform offers trading in a decent number of cryptos (174 different trading pairs at the date of first writing this review, 20 December 2018).

Do you like to monitor your cryptocurrency investments, and even do some trading, while on your phone? If so, this exchange has an app for you: Liquid Pro App. With this app, you can use most features of the trading platform and won’t even need a desktop at all!

Cryptocurrency is the means to achieve this and our mission is to provide the products and services necessary for the crypto world to become the new mainstream. The future of finance is distributed. Democratization of finance has begun. The power is in everyone’s hands. The crypto economy is here. With more than USD50 billion in transactions over the past 12 months (as at May 2019) on our exchanges, we believe Liquid will be the bridge to the future world of finance.

Liquidity

With respect to liquidity, this is a strong exchange. On Coinmarketcap's list of exchanges based on 24 hour trading volume, the exchange was on place no. 22 on the date of first writing this review (20 December 2018). Their 24 hour trading volume was approx. USD 277 million. Looking at the 30 day trading volume, the exchange is placed even better at the list (top 20), with a 30 day trading volume of approx. USD 4 billion. 

On the date of last updating this review however (23 March 2020, right in the middle of the crisis with COVID-19), the exchange's trading volume had decreased slightly but the place on the list had decreased dramatically. On this date, their 24 hour trading volume was USD 162 million but that only gave them place no. 67 on the list. 30 day trading volume was 5.7 billion (so an improvement actually).

US-investors

US-investors may only trade crypto-to-crypto (and not fiat-to-crypto) here. The primary reason for excluding US-investors from fiat-to-crypto trading is legal. The US-legal regime imposes obligations on many companies accepting funds from US-investors. Such obligations include, inter alia, preparing marketing material in accordance with SEC-standards and registering them with the SEC (a burdensome process). If you’re a US-investor looking for a platform where you can trade fiat-to-crypto, use our Exchange Filters to find out which alternatives you have.

Liquid Trading View

Different exchanges have different trading views. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the views normally have in common is that they all show the order book or at least part of the order book, a price chart of the chosen cryptocurrency and order history. They normally also have buy and sell-boxes. Before you choose an exchange, try to have a look at the trading view so that you can ascertain that it feels right to you. The below is a picture of the somewhat limited trading view at Liquid:

Liquid Trading fees

When looking at trading fees at a cryptocurrency exchange, you must first understand the concept of “maker” and “taker”. Every trade occurs between these two parties: the maker, whose order exists on the order book prior to the trade, and the taker, who places the order that matches (or “takes”) the maker’s order. We call makers “makers” because their orders make the liquidity in a market. Takers are the ones who remove this liquidity by matching makers’ orders with their own.

Liquid has an interesting fee offering. Takers 0.30% in trading fees (or 0.15% if you pay the trading fees in QASH). As the global industry average is around 0.25%, Liquid’s fees is just slightly above the industry average.

However, this exchange does not charge any fees for makers, thus promoting the liquidity at the exchange. This is a very strong part of Liquid's offering and can be really helpful for people interested in not picking up existing orders from the orderbook.

Liquid is an online cryptocurrency exchange where you can trade a wide range of fiat/crypto and crypto/crypto currency pairs. Its innovative order book, called the World Book, combines a global network of liquidity sources in order to provide access to a higher level of liquidity and better price matching. The site also offers Liquid Margin, where you can trade with up to 25x leverage, and has its own utility token known as QASH. You can use QASH to pay for services on Liquid, and at the time of writing (September 2018), it was soon to undergo a rebrand to become Liquid Token (LQD).

Liquid’s parent company, Quoine, is headquartered in Tokyo and is licensed by the Japanese Financial Services Agency. Quoine was founded in 2014 and launched Quoinex, a fiat-to-crypto trading platform, in the same year.

In 2017, the company launched a crypto-to-crypto exchange known as Qryptos, and in the 12 months to July 2018, the two platforms handled a combined total of more than $50 billion in transactions. In September 2018, Liquid was formed from the amalgamation of Quoinex and Qryptos.

Which cryptocurrencies can I buy/sell?

Liquid lists dozens of cryptocurrencies on its trading platform, so there’s not enough space to include them all here. However, some of the currencies you can buy and sell on Liquid include the following:

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• XRP
• Bitcoin Cash
• Litecoin
• Stellar Lumens
• NEO
• NEM
• Ethereum Classic
• Qtum
• Electroneum
• Fusion

Deposit Methods

Liquid offers wire transfer as a deposit method, but you can’t deposit via credit card. According to information from Liquid to us here at Cryptowisser, credit card funding will be available also at this trading platform sometime during January-March 2019. So if you need to deposit fiat currency via credit card but there is no urgent need to do it, Liquid might still be the right place for you.

A concluding note to make here is that Liquid is among the first (if not the first) crypto exchange to enable FIO deposit addresses. If you deposit crypto to an exchange, you normally need to input a long series of letters and numbers, and it is easy to input something wrong. There are a lot of stories about people sending large amounts of crypto to the wrong address simply because they mistyped one letter or digit in their 40+-character deposit address. Well, if you're at Liquid, that will hopefully not happen anymore! A FIO deposit address is like a regular email-address: mike@gmail.com. From 13 January 2021, you can register these types of addresses as deposit addresses at Liquid. Very convenient in our opinion. 

Customer support

If you have any problems with your account or even a specific transaction, Liquid’s online support center contains several guides and answers to a wide range of FAQs. If you need further assistance, you can open a live chat window to start a conversation with the Liquid support team.

Pros and cons

Pros

• User-friendly interface
• Access to an extensive range of fiat/crypto and crypto/crypto trading pairs
• Very competitive trading fees, including a rebate for market makers on crypto/crypto pairs
• Good range of security features
• Leverage trading also available

Cons

• Slow withdrawal times
• Withdrawal costs (including payment processor fees) can be expensive