How to trade Bitcoin in 2025? Best exchanges, automation and tips

Trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become increasingly more popular over the past few years. In this article, we will give you some insight on how to trade Bitcoin.

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If you are looking to trade Bitcoin and make money doing so, choosing the right exchange is a must. Below we will review the top 3 Bitcoin trading exchanges that are reliable, trustworthy and can be used for both shorting and longing Bitcoin.

If you are unfamiliar with the meaning of shorting or longing then head over to our article about how to short and long Bitcoin.

Bybit is a relatively new margin trading exchange, founded in March 2018, that has quickly grown and is becoming the most popular leverage trading exchange.

Bybit offers leverage 1x to 100x leverage in case you want to risk more to win more. Be careful when using high leverage as you collateral can be easily wiped out.

Collateral is the amount you put up for loaning more money in order to trade. You do not have to use over 1x leverage, but doing so can be highly profitable.

Bybit has a cross margin feature that automatically uses all your balance as collateral to make sure you avoid liquidation. Liquidation happens when the price moves in the opposite direction of your position and you run out of collateral for the position you have taken. In case you do get liquidated the exchange takes a hefty fee for handling the liquidation. So make sure you never get liquidated and use a proper stop loss instead.

The calculators available under the “Calculators” section in our website can help you make educated trading decisions about where to place your stop loss and how far you liquidation price would be. The same information is also shown on Bybit’s website as you open a position.

You can trade the following cryptocurrencies on Bybit (4):

All of these cryptocurrencies are traded against USD (US Dollar).

Bybit prohibits the residents of the following countries to use its service:

The U.S restricted from many trading exchanges. If you are from the U.S then I recommend using Kraken for trading.

Bybit takes 0.075% fee on taker orders (orders that get instantly filled) and pays you 0.025% for maker order (orders that go into the order book). That means if you use maker orders you can actually make money by getting your orders filled and providing liquidity.

As Bybit is a relatively new exchange the liquidity on their exchange is not as good as Bitmex’s, which has been around for a while. Fortunately, unless you are trading with millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies the liquidity issue does not affect you at all.

Bybit has one of the best trading engines in the industry. They claim that their trading engine can do about 100,000 transactions per seconds. Other exchanges such as Deribit and Bitmex do not even come close to this kind of throughput. Thus Bybit is the only exchange that does not suffer from “overload” issues that prevent you from modifying or inserting orders during the times of high volatility.

Bybit’s customer service is top-notch. They offer both e-mail and live chat support and my issues and questions have always been quickly taken care of with utmost professionalism.

Deribit is another popular margin trading exchange, founded in 2016. In addition to derivatives and futures, Deribit is one of the few exchanges to also offer trading options.

If you are someone looking to trade options then Deribit is definitely the way to go.

Deribit’s user interface is easy to use and understand. The customer support is also decent, I have not had any issues with Deribit’s customer support at all. But unfortunately, there have been some issues with Deribit’s trading engine, which liquidated a lot of people recently due to technical problem. Deribit decided to refund their customers, which is a good sign that they care about their users.

Deribit only supports 2 different cryptocurrencies:

If you are looking to trade other cryptocurrencies such as Ripple (XRP) or EOS then you should look at either Bybit or Bitmex.

Deribit allows traders from all over the world, except for the U.S. If you are from the U.S then I recommend using Kraken for trading.

Deribit’s fee structure is very similar to Bybit's. They also take 0.075% on taker orders and pay you 0.025% for maker orders.

Deribit is a great choice for getting started in trading. Their user interface is simple and easy to understand. Another benefit of Deribit is that they allow you to withdraw instantly, while Bybit processes withdrawals 4 times a day and Bitmex does it only once a day.

Bitmex is one of the first and oldest margin trading exchanges around, founded in 2014. Bitmex offers a bigger selection of different cryptocurrencies than its competitors such as Bybit and Deribit

Bitmex’s downsides are that it only processes withdrawals once per day and that its trading engine is slow and outdated. Bitmex itself claims that the trading engine lags during high volatility times due to a high number of transactions, but it is speculated that Bitmex actually profits from the “overloads” themselves by trading against their customers. Keep in mind that this is only a speculation and it is not verified.

Bitmex offers to trade with the following cryptocurrencies (8):

For all of these trading pairs, the collateral is in Bitcoin.

Bitmex prohibits you from using their service if you are from one of the following countries:

If you are from the U.S then I recommend using Kraken for trading.

Similarly to Deribit

Bitmex is a great option if you are looking to trade other coins besides the ones supported by Bybit and Deribit. If you are not looking to trade these altcoins then I would not use Bitmex as its trading engine suffers from huge issues that can be costly. Sometimes your stop-loss order will not trigger and Bitmex’s customer support doesn’t care about that all. Other services (such as Bybit) are known to take responsibility and refund you.

If you are someone that does not have the time or finds it boring to sit behind the computer and watch charts then perhaps automation is the way to go. There are a lot of different, very flexible and advanced trading bots available for trading cryptocurrencies.

Trading bots can help you make sure that you do not get mixed up in your emotions and take the wrong trades when you should not. Trading bot always follows the rules set up by you automatically.

Here are two of our favourite trading bots.

3Commas, founded in 2014, has over 40,000 users and they claim that they handle more than $10 million in trades every day.

3Commas has a lot of excellent and exciting features to automate your trading. Their user interface can be a bit confusing at first, but you will quickly get used to it and feel at home.

I definitely recommend trying out 3Commas yourself as they have so many features. I cannot fit them all into this short article. If you choose to try it yourself, click here to get a free trial for 3 days.

3Commas supports a total of 21 exchanges with the following features:

3Commas trading bot has the following features available:

The pricing of 3Commas starts from $25 a month and goes up to $84 dollars a month. You can find the differences between plans here.

3Commas is a popular and reliable choice if you are looking to automate your trading. They also offer a free trial, where you can try out their functionality.

Cryptohopper, created in 2017, based in the Netherlands, is a relatively new trading bot. Cryptohopper claims to have over 75,000 users registered on their platform.

Cryptohopper’s platform is very flexible and suited for both “newbies” and more seasoned traders. Their wide range of features makes them an excellent choice for someone looking to get into automated trading at a relatively low cost.

Cryptohopper supports the following exchanges (10):

Cryptohopper has the following features:

Cryptohopper's plans start at $16.58 / Month for Explorer package and go up to $83.25 / Month for Hero package. When you first sign up to Cryptohopper you can take advantage of their 7-day free trial to try out all of their features.

Cryptohopper has more advanced features (such as Strategy Designer) than 3Commas, but unfortunately, it does not support margin (leveraged) trading platforms. If you are just looking to trade Bitcoin or altcoins on Binance (for example) then Cryptohopper is a great choice for you.

In this paragraph, we will cover any other helpful services when you are looking to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These services are not a must but can be really helpful if you know how to use them.

Tradingview is hands-down the best charting service around. The pricing is affordable - they offer a free plan and the cheapest plan costs $14.95 a month.

You can instantly look at every major cryptocurrency’s, stock’s and other instruments charts. Draw lines, add indicators and set alerts using TradingView. Even some of the bots available for Bitcoin trading can trade based on the alerts you set up on your TradingView account.

TradingView has about 100 built-in indicators including RSI (Relative Strength Index), MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) and other popular indicators. In addition to the built-in indicators, there are thousands of community-built indicators literally for everything. Or if you are looking to build your own trading indicator you can do that too!

BTCTools is the site you are currently on. Under the Statistics section, you can find a lot of important information about what’s happening currently on the Bitcoin markets. This information includes the open interest of Bitmex, largest trades and liquidations happening in real-time and positions taken by known big traders.

In addition to the statistics available on this website, we also have a lot of helpful calculators under the “Calculators” section that can help you to manage the risk of your trades and become more profitable.

Trading can be highly profitable but is also extremely risky. Choosing the right tools and exchange for your trading activities is a must. Hopefully, our article helped you figure out how to trade Bitcoin.