Hi Hamse,

If BTC/USD trading is available, you can use BTC instead of ETH — it will just take a bit longer for the transfer to clear.

That being said, you can still directly send ETH to Binance from Coinbase and skip GDAX. This, however, incurs a fee. I wrote about that in my other article: https://medium.com/p/quickest-guide-to-investing-in-xrp-ripple-cryptocurrency-with-usd-a38685393c30