Picking a cryptocurrency exchange can feel like a daunting task. There are so many out there, and it’s often challenging to choose the “best” one. Each market has its pros and cons. Some have amazing apps, for example. Others have a wide variety of cryptocurrencies that you can trade. However, if you’ve been in the crypto business for a while, you tend to get a good feel for when exchanges are good or not. One look at Bitpanda’s site, and you’ll see it’s a professional place that you’ll probably want to use to trade digital currencies. See what makes this place so unique in our Bitpanda review!
Bitpanda Review: A Brief Background of the Company
Bitpanda is a fintech company based in Vienna, Austria. This company was founded in 2014 by Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek, and Christian Trummer. Their stated goal is to break down barriers that people face in finance and bring traditional financial products into the 21st century. It’s an ambitious goal, no doubt.
They have been quite successful at this mission! At the time of this writing, they have over 2,000,000 users and over 330 team members. Bitpanda is not a small operation by any means. Indeed, it’s one of the largest in Europe!
Part of what makes this company so successful is that they never seem to stop expanding and growing. They’re frequently creating new financial products and services to offer to their clients.
What Does Bitpanda Do?
At its core, Bitpanda is a brokerage service that enables customers to trade cryptocurrencies.
However, the company has grown substantially and now offers a wide variety of services to customers. Bitpanda is truly a “one-stop shop” for everything crypto-related.
There are a total of 9 services (above and beyond the primary brokerage) you can get with Bitpanda:
- Bitpanda Swap: This platform lets you instantly trade digital assets. You can immediately swap between Bitcoin, for example, and another cryptocurrency.
- Bitpanda Savings: Use this service to create an automated savings plan that helps you invest in your favourite cryptocurrencies incrementally.
- Bitpanda Metals: If you want to invest in gold, silver, palladium, and platinum, this is one of the best ways to do so. You can buy real metals to diversify your portfolio.
- Bitpanda Crypto Index: Buying this “Crypto Index” is a little like buying a crypto mutual fund. There are three indices, each containing five, 10, and 25 cryptocurrencies – depending on how diversified you want to be.
- Bitpanda Ecosystem Token: The BEST token is Bitpanda’s custom cryptocurrency token designed to facilitate more straightforward rewards and provide better benefits and discounts to customers.
- The Bitpanda Debit Card: This VISA debit card lets you spend any of your cryptocurrencies like cash.
- Bitpanda Pay: Pay is a little bit of a misnamed service because it might make you think of things like “Apple Pay” or “Google Pay.” Instead, Bitpanda Pay lets you pay your bills by sending money conveniently to any IBAN.
- Bitpanda To Go: Available only in Austria, Bitpanda To Go are prepaid amounts to redeem for cryptocurrency on the platform. So, someone can buy a 500 Euro card at the post office and put that into their Bitpanda account.
- Bitpanda App: The Bitpanda app is available for both iOS and Android. It lets you buy, sell, and swap any cryptocurrency on your mobile device!
As you can see, Bitpanda is very much a single shop for everything you need for cryptocurrency. Need to pay your rent? There’s Bitpanda Pay for that. Want to go to the supermarket? Get a Bitpanda debit card!
What Can I Trade With Bitpanda?
All the above features sound good on paper, but they’re not very useful if you cannot trade in the cryptocurrencies you want. Fortunately for traders, Bitpanda offers a wide variety of cryptocurrencies from which you can choose.
There are 52 (yes, 52) cryptocurrencies from which you can choose at the time of this writing.
That’s too many to list here, so we’ll go over the most common ones that you will probably want to trade on this platform:
- Bitcoin (BTC)
- Litecoin (LTC)
- Ethereum (ETH)
- Dash (DASH)
- Ripple (XRP)
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
- Stellar (XLM)
- Dogecoin (DOGE)
- Tron (TRX)
There are many more that you can trade! Bitpanda has practically every single cryptocurrency that you could want.
This platform works with five different fiat currencies, including the US dollar, Euro, British Pound, Turkish Lira, and Swiss Franc.
Bitpanda accepts many European-centric options for payment methods, including SEPA, Sofort, Giropay, iDEAL, and more. These methods are, of course, above and beyond the standard credit, debit, and bank transfer deposits that practically every exchange accepts.
As you can see from this part of the Bitpanda review, you can trade a lot with this fantastic platform! The only weakness is the number of fiat currencies you can hold. Being limited to five options might not be ideal for some people. However, if you live and work in the UK, you should find that these five cover most of your transactions.
Bitpanda Apps and Website
As evidenced so far, Bitpanda excels in ticking off the proverbial boxes of what most cryptocurrency users would want in a platform. It supports a wide variety of crypto coins, and it has a wide variety of services and investment options that both newbies and experienced traders will like.
Bitpanda goes one step further with its app and website. These are some of the most easy-to-use tools to trade Bitcoin. The app interface is brilliantly simplistic and intuitive, as is the website!
One of the best features of the Bitpanda app is how easy it is to do basic tasks. For example, do you want to create an automated savings plan? No problem! Just go to the Savings screen and tap “Add Savings Plan.” You’ll say what you want to buy, how much, and when to buy it. Do you want to start investing in one of the crypto indexes? Again, no problem! Just head to the index page and tap “Buy.”
Bitpanda has truly made buying and selling crypto as easy and intuitive as buying and selling stocks!
Bitpanda Review: What’s the Cost?
With many of the cryptocurrency brokerages, the issue quickly becomes the fees they charge. Some cards and exchanges can charge seemingly innocuous fees that add up to thousands of pounds. Or, worse, they require subscriptions that rapidly wind up costing a lot of money to do the simplest of things.
Fortunately, with Bitpanda, this is not the case.
The fee to buy and sell cryptocurrencies is 1.49%. That means, if the currency is £1, you’ll pay £1.0149 to buy it. One fascinating thing about the Bitpanda platform is that it does not provide a breakdown of the currency’s price and the fee to buy or sell. Instead, it just shows up as the price. From a user perspective, that makes the math simpler. However, it also means that you will think that Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies are more than they are.
There is also a fee to deposit money via one of the approved methods. These fees are typically in the 1-2% range. You can avoid all deposit fees by initiating a bank transfer. These fees are, of course, understandable. If you deposit £100 via MasterCard, Bitpanda won’t receive £100. The payment processor will take some amount out for the merchant account fee. Therefore, to help offset that cost, Bitpanda takes a small percentage of the deposit.
Is There Anything UK Residents Need To Know?
For UK residents, there isn’t anything in particular that you’ll need to know about Bitpanda. While this platform tends to be a little more EU-centric, everything will work as you would expect in the UK. You’ll be able to open an account, deposit money, withdraw funds, and take advantage of all the Bitpanda services (minus the To Go cards, which are only available in Austria). Of course, some of the depositing methods (like Sofort) won’t work because they’re not in the UK, but other than that, getting money in and out of Bitpanda should be easy!
Bitpanda Review: One of the Best Crypto Brokers in Europe
As is self-evident from this Bitpanda review, it’s hard to say if there is a better cryptocurrency broker in Europe right now than Bitpanda. This platform is intuitive and makes it easy to get started trading cryptocurrency. It also does so with very reasonable fees and a gorgeous app and website.
Bitpanda’s success has been constant, from one year to the next, so it’s inspiring to think about where this company might be in another 5-10 years. In 2016, they won a startup award as the best Fintech Startup, and five years later, they have emerged as the premier destination for everything cryptocurrency in Europe.
Everyone who is thinking about getting started with cryptocurrency should sign up with a Bitpanda account. It’s fast and free (as in, you can open the account, but to trade crypto, you’ll need to deposit money).
If you’re interested in signing up for Bitpanda, please click here! You’ll be up and running in the world of crypto in no time!
