Greetings to this wonderful SteemitCryptoAcademy community and my thanks again for teaching me everything about the crypto market. I am excited to participate again in this second week of contest.

This is my participation for Steemit Crypto Academy Contest Season 1 Week 2 - Reviewing Centralized Exchanges, in which I wish to demonstrate everything I have understood about centralized markets.

1- Discuss briefly Centralized exchanges and its Benefits to crypto users.

In the crypto world for us investors mostly, who trade digital currency (cryptocurrencies), for us the most important thing is the platform that we will use as a vehicle to trade the centralized cryptocurrency exchange. Centralized cryptocurrency exchange houses are the platforms that are online, and we will use them to trade (buy and sell) cryptocurrencies (digital currency).

A centralized exchange is a platform that in addition to being online also includes the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies with fiat money (fiat/crypto pairs) and also allows the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies with other cryptocurrencies which means with crypto/crypto pairs within the centralized exchange. It is an online marketplace for trading within the entire cryptographic network, also to perform our trading operations in a secure way.

Centralized exchanges serve as a third party in the negotiation offering their services of control, administration and security of the private keys of investors, traders or users who decide to operate within their platform.

So the centralized exchanges (CEX) are in charge of protecting the keys or passwords and with this provide users with peace of mind and thus avoid those feelings of fear or concern when a case of losing or forgetting the keys arises, because it will allow users to recover their private keys.

Benefits for cryptocurrency users

The centralized exchanges provide us with many advantages that favor all users, I will name some of these benefits that we obtain when negotiating on these platforms.

• They offer liquidity, because they allow us to deposit and withdraw quickly, this happens because these CEX platforms have enough or many assets that are available, with high speed transactions and this made these CEX triumph within the crypto market.

• Centralization is a benefit, because these platforms have their central servers to store all data and important information such as keys to back up the information of all users of these centralized exchanges. It has the key recovery process in the case of loss or forgetfulness of this important data to access the account.

• Regulation, CEXs mostly seek permits in some countries for operations, to demonstrate that they have stability. They have the necessary measures to protect users and investors, they also issue risk alerts to users or investors on the action that is irreversible in carrying out transactions and operations. To provide customers with the confidence to use these CEX.

• Reduction of fraudulent activities such as scams within centralized exchanges. Because through the KYC process they perform for the verification of each user's information, this prevents fraudsters from carrying out their acts of theft because your personal information is provided within the platform.

• The centralized exchanges have a pleasant and easy-to-use interface for customers, offering simple and less complicated crypto trading at the time of trading for users and investors.

2- What do you look out for when choosing an exchange to trade your crypto assest?

What I take into account first of all is to perform the action of evaluating and reviewing the list of assets that exist on the exchange, also review the rates offered by the exchange platforms. Before choosing an exchange I make sure that this platform complies with the following characteristics:

• That it has liquidity. This exchange must offer enough crypto assets and fiat money available, to supply the required transactions.

• Security and protection of users' information and assets.

• A pleasant and simple interface so that users can understand how to use the platform.

• Offer excellence in service to users. The service offered by the exchange plays an important role because as users we expect to be attended with speed and kindness in our requests in any case that may occur.

3- Review your favorite centralized exchange and explain its unique features

Screenshot of www.binance.com

My favorite centralized exchange is Binance, because during the time that I have used this platform it offers me all the benefits that I expect to obtain in the operations that I have made within it.

All of us who are inside the crypto world know that the Binance platform is recognized worldwide, because it has the highest percentage of cryptocurrency exchange operations worldwide, it also has enough assets and fiat money to respond to most of the transactions required by all users.

Binance is a centralized exchange platform that allows users to perform trading and operations, through this to obtain short, medium and long term benefits in real time, it offers more than 100 cryptocurrencies to perform our exchange operations.

Unique Binance features

This platform has features that are unique, for this reason much of the success Binance has had is because it provides users with greater convenience and understanding in the different areas in the management that this platform offers. Here are some of Binance's unique features:

• Several ways to access your Binance account. With Binance we can easily login on our cell phone with the application by just scanning a QR code, this code is obtained from the official Binance login page. It is also accessible and easy for the user to recover his password in case he has forgotten or lost it, this platform offers you different ways to access your account by logging in with your cell phone number, with your email, and also with google accounts or apple accounts.

• Another feature is that it allows us to trade cryptocurrencies that are in its list of pairs.

Screenshot of www.binance.com

• It offers a wide variety of languages, which we can change at any time to the language we understand.

Screenshot of www.binance.com

• It offers us necessary tools such as trading that allows us to operate in margin, spot, or futures and also perform analysis.

• You have services available such as cryptocurrency academy, wallets, charities, among others.

Screenshot of www.binance.com

• The P2P method: this method is a process that allows the exchange of cryptocurrencies for fiat currency, this process can be done almost anywhere in the world.

Screenshot of www.binance.com

4- Is there anything about your favorite exchange you will like to be changed? Discuss.

Through a list I want to show you what I would like to improve in the Binance platform, these changes or improvements are:

1- That the authentication or KYC verification process is faster and less complicated, that they can implement better strategies to improve this process and make it more pleasant and faster for new users.

2- When the platform is in maintenance it does not allow users to make the deposit of cryptocurrencies or tokens, and this can take days, they should improve this problem so that the maintenance is faster and more efficient or that they improve the system to be able to make deposits even at the time of maintenance.

3- Improve the attention to users, so that it is faster at the time of answering or resolving any request.

5- What shortcomings do you see on centralized exchanges and how do you think user funds can be protected since we don’t have access to our wallet private keys?

Centralized exchanges have their disadvantages or shortcomings, some of these shortcomings are:

• The costs of gas fees per transaction are high compared to decentralized exchanges.

• CEXs run the risk of being attacked by hackers or so-called hackers who take advantage of their centralized system to steal users' funds.

• Unfortunately there is little transparency, because there is manipulation of the graphs in the volumes within these centralized exchanges, I am not saying that all manipulate this data but there are some that do.

How do we protect our funds?

Here I will give you some recommendations to protect our funds:

• Use centralized exchanges only to make profit with short term trading or stanking.

• It is not advisable to loiter or keep our funds in the long term, in this case it is better to use decentralized wallets.

• After performing our operations in centralized exchanges it is good to send and save our funds to our decentralized wallets, because these are private and only we have the keys to our accounts providing greater security and protection of our assets.

Any exchange, whether centralized or decentralized, has its advantages and disadvantages. ***What I mean by this is that we must know how to take advantage of the benefits that these exchanges offer us, use everything to our advantage and be smart in how we decide to trade and how to store our funds. We will always be responsible for our decisions regarding which exchange we choose.

Conclusion

In conclusion I want to emphasize that as a student of the SteemitCryptoAcademy community I have learned a lot about the types of exchanges both centralized and decentralized, and what both exchanges offer us, but it is up to us how to take advantage of the benefits that these exchanges offer us as I mentioned before.

I know I still have a lot to learn about the crypto world, but I am very grateful for every class I read in this community because it helped me a lot to understand so many topics that are so necessary to have the ability and knowledge to perform operations within these platforms, "everything is in the knowledge, because if we do not seek training and study, we can lose a lot of money ".

Thank you very much for your attention!