Starting to care way less about exchange size and more about whether it just works

With BTC chopping around 70k-71k and these geopolitical wicks blowing up longs lately, tbh i've been thinking a lot about exchange reliability.

Default advice is always 'stick to binance or coinbase because volume'. but sheer size feels like a weird metric for trust right now. we still see the biggest platforms lagging out the second the market dumps 5%, or hitting you with random withdrawal holds right when u actually need liquidity.

Makes me wonder what actually gets a non-tier-1 exchange into regular rotation. for me it mostly comes down to friction. i dont need a platform to process 20 billion a day, i just need it to let me trade without treating me like a criminal.

Split some of my perp trading between kraken pro and bydfi recently to test this out. bydfi is obviously a lot smaller and the UI took a couple days to get used to, but execution on hot pairs like IranCoin and MIGA was actually lightning fast during that Iran news dump last week. honestly it was just nice that the onboarding didnt require me to fight a 3-day pending document review just to adjust my margin.

Feels like the gap between the giants and the smaller exchanges is definately closing, at least on the UX side. i just want a platform that doesn't lock me out the second the chart goes red.