I’d be surprised if trying to get a medium/large amount of USD into gate.io from US banks or payment processors wouldn’t freak out the latters’ compliance/risk/AML people. Whereas transfers into Coinbase are more of a known entity to them. A three-figure amount like you mentioned might fly under the radar, but definitely curious to learn from your experience!
Here’s another earlier thread that suggests transferring Litecoin into gate.io, since Litecoin has very low txn fees. But then you have an extra trade on gate.io (first swap LTC for USDT, to then swap USDT for XCH) so you’d want to run the numbers on the all-in fee+spread friction. Wanna buy XCH today — Coin swap 101