I've spent the last week looking at Banking again.

MEXC now demands KYC in Europe and has "updated" their offers (i.e. made them suck).

CoinEx is doing the same with KYC and blocks UK users from any kind of fixed/flexi earning.

All those lovely 15% APYs on ETH, BTC and SOL?

Disappeared.

Why?

Because crypto banking has gone TradFi.

There are only four ways to get good rates now.

• You can put your coins on a smaller exchange with better offers and hope they don't rug you.
• You can stake coins with high APYs. Those will devalue because of the whales staking millions of them and selling the earnings while your 100 coins sits in a never-ending staking queue, desperately trying to be seen.
• You can stake/hold shitcoins with high interest offers and hope that they'll be worth something.
• You can stake/hold stablecoins and get 10% or more, but the coins themselves won't rise in value. And let's face it, BTC and ETH are gonna go up by a hell of a lot more than 10% in a year.

Short version: regulation and the exchanges' fear of government retribution have killed Banking.

OK, so that's hyperbole. 

It's not actually dead, but it's not the excellent earner it was until now.

KYC Will Be Mandatory

You're almost certainly gonna have to do KYC to get anything from here on out, unless you stake on-chain in your own wallet(s), though even those are regulated now. I can't stake SOL in Exodus because I'm in the UK. 😡

As crypto gets more and more centralised, tracked, and regulated, governments demand KYC from exchanges.

Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it only stops 0.1% of money laundering, criminal activity, or any of the stuff it's supposed to stop. Yes, it costs exchanges 1,000 times more than the money it recoups from those activities.

What it does do is make sure you pay tax.

So you're gonna have to do it unless you hunt through the KYCnot.me list to find sites to use and cross your fingers they don't rug you.

The good news is that, assuming you do KYC, you can earn interest on even the tiniest amount of banked crypto.

What Are The Options?

I spent the last week looking around exchanges and what they offer, trying to find somewhere outside the TradFi framework.

They're all inside now. 

The establishment has scared them enough that they comply (MEXC) or simply cut off the service (CoinEx).

So from what I've seen (and I'm not claiming it's definitive in any way) your options are the same as mine, though I'm not gonna give you advice, of course:

1. Hold the coins yourself and get nothing
2. Move it all into Trading
3. Move it into stablecoins for higher rates
4. Keep Banking crypto and accept lower rates

Option 1 is the safest: your keys, your coins. You still get the price rises and there's no risk, at least until some asshole builds a quantum computer that break everything.

Option 2 is the riskiest: if you suck at trading, like me, then you could lose a lot. 

Option 3 is lower risk: you're still on an exchange, but you're getting better interest rates. I think you're an idiot for accepting 10% to 15% on dollars when crypto rises faster (the big ones only) but hey, your choice.

Option 4 is the best in my book: you're still risking high-trust exchanges suddenly disappearing (low risk, thankfully), but you've got your backstop, you're earning a small amount of crypto, and it's all in crypto so you get the price rises.

What I'm Doing

Short version: I haven't changed anything significant!

CoinEx is now dead for me. I could VPN it through the Phillipines to get their interest rates but I don't want to risk it. When even one of the laxest, least bothered exchanges starts shutting things down, it's time to play safe. I'll miss their Dual Investment trading. ☹️

So it's all at MEXC now, until/unless I find better somewhere. I'm open to suggestions from you folks, too!

BTC is now earning 8% up to 0.01 BTC - great for folks with $1 or $10 or even a few hundred - then drops to 0.4% (!!). I have almost that much there, so I'll leave it to earn for a year or so and put future BTC in my own wallet (Electrum, if anyone wonders). It won't earn but 0.4% (or even 0.15% for big holders with 0.03 BTC or more) is bullshit.

ETH also earns 8% up to 0.2 ETH, then 2% up to 0.5 ETH, then 1.3% after that. The best I've found for my 2 ETH is Kraken offering 2.34% but they don't show details unless you're holding some, so I don't know if that's for any amount, requires lockup, or any detail at all. A shitty AI search says it needs lockup, so that's a no for me. I'll keep holding mine at MEXC despite the awful APY because I have a lot. It works out as more interest (in ETH, not %) and I want to be able to sell at ATH and re-buy! 

SOL is now earning 6% up to 3 SOL (a surprisingly low limit, less than half the other two), then 3.5% upwards. You can get 5.18% by staking it on-chain instead, but that has the 5-day wait to unstake. But - and it's a big but - you can trade MXSOL, their liquid token that represents SOL and the rates stay pretty balanced between the two. For 1.5% difference? Yeah, I think I'll take that.

I'll keep an eye on what rates they offer. I can move funds and earn/stake if they change suddenly.

I have also added DASH to my Banking list. It earns somewhere between 4% and 7% a year, is stable as anything, sometimes pumps to 50% or 100% profit and is dirt cheap to buy and move. I'm holding that at StakeCube, where it's on daily earn.

Have you been hit by this latest wave of establishment control? Sucking it up or finding alternatives? I'd love to hear!