What is Dust?

“Dust” refers to  tiny amounts of cryptocurrency - too small to meet the minimum trade requirements - that accumulate over time when spot trading.

Why does Dust accumulate?

Dust accumulates due to the nature of Binance's entry fees.

These fees are taken out of the purchased asset, meaning the amount you buy and the amount you receive differ very slightly.

When this combines with the minimum order size of an asset on Binance spot, it means a small amount of unsellable asset is often left over.

We can see that here:

On this XVG trade, VEMA calculated my position size as 21949 XVG.

When VEMA buys this, Binance then took an entry fee of 0.1% or 21.949 XVG from the 21949 purchased.

This leave me with 21927.051 XVG, however, Binance does not accept order sizes of fractional XVG (i.e. we can only buy and sell whole numbers of Verge).

So when I go to exit this trade, I can only assign 21927 XVG to my Stop Losses and Take Profit orders, Binance will not accept the 0.051 XVG amount.

The 0.051 XVG is now dust - it is not worthless, as I still hold a portion of the asset, but I cannot easily sell it to recoup my capital.

How much dust will accumulate?

While dust values are usually insignificant, they can add up over time.

While implementing spot trading, a close eye was kept on dust accumulation as a range of assets were traded. 

This led to around $10 USDT of dust building up over 20 trades, with the majority of dust accumulating on BTC trades (usually around $0.8 USDT worth per trade).

How to convert it to something useful?

How to Convert Dust on Binance

To help users recover funds tied up in dust, Binance introduced a “Small Amount Exchange” feature allowing you to sell dust amounts back into popular assets such as USDT or BNB.

Here’s how you can do it:

Follow this link, then proceed to step 5

Or

1. Log in to your Binance account.

2. Go to Assets, 

3. Select Spot

4. Select  “Small Amount Exchange”

   
    

5. Select the asset you would like your dust converted into

6. Check the boxes for the tokens you’d like to convert.

7. Click “Convert.”

The selected tokens are instantly swapped into your asset and added to your wallet balance.

What are the consequences of Dust Build up?

Dust build up will not affect position sizing, as these calculations are done using Total Balance.

It may however begin to affect position placement if the build up becomes significant, as Spot positions can only be placed using the available USDT balance. 

When should I convert dust?

You can easily see how much dust is accumulated either in Binance directly as above, or in VEMA when you have no open live spot positions.

The difference between your available margin and total balance with no Live Spot positions open will be your accumulated dust value.

In the screenshot below, you can see I have a Total Balance of $921.30, and available margin of $914.60. 
I have no open positions, so I can quickly see I have built up around $6.70 USDT in dust balances.

To avoid dust build up beginning to affect positions being placed, you may wish to covert dust on a set schedule, such as the first of every month, or once it reaches a given USDT value.