BitBay

Bitcoin really started to hit the big time in the early 2010s, with its price first eclipsing $100 in 2013. There were a few reasons for its explosive success, but one of them was its location-independent nature. It differed from traditional fiat currencies in this way. In the years since then, however, things have started to change. While some crypto exchanges have maintained their global presence, we’ve also seen a number of exchanges spring up that make a virtue of being based in a particular region or country. This BitBay review is going to look at just such an exchange.

Why would people actively choose one of these exchanges? For the residents of a particular nation, an exchange that supports their currency will automatically be appealing. More patriotic folk might simply want to support innovative businesses from their country.

Whatever the reasons, exchanges like BitBay—which was proudly formed in Poland—are getting more numerous and more popular. In this review, I’ll take a look at whether or not the BitBay exchange can appeal to not just Poles, but to a worldwide audience.

Let’s get started.

itBay Key Features

BitBay is a Polish cryptocurrency exchange, which ranks 54th worldwide (out of 208 exchanges) on CoinMarketCap at the time of writing. It aims to be a “professional and intuitive trading platform” for crypto trading.

These are some of BitBay’s key features to be aware of. I’ll investigate BitBay’s features in more detail later in the review.

Liquidity

Experienced traders know the vital importance of being able to get in and out of trades quickly, particularly when trading something as volatile as cryptos.

BitBay helps to ensure liquidity through its strong volume numbers. Some 125 transactions are made every minute, and almost $19 million worth of trades are processed each day, according to the BitBay CoinMarketCap stats. With over 800,000 active users also in place, you’ll rarely have trouble finding a quick trade.

Trading Tools

Again, this is one area where veteran traders will be extremely interested.

BitBay caters to them extremely well with its trading tools. These include excellent price charts, a dedicated “PRO” mode for professional traders, and even weekly webinars discussing the state of the market.

Security

BitBay’s team reassures users that “safety is our priority” in big letters on the website, which is something I like to hear!

The Bit Bay security features are numerous, both for user accounts and for the wider site. These include 2FA, cold wallet storage, encryption, and manual authorization of transactions by BitBay employees.

Markets

BitBay provides an excellent selection of cryptocurrencies, which you can trade against each other or fiats. These include BTC, ETH, LTC, DASH, and XRP.

Even though the fiat offerings are noticeably slim, the inclusion of PLN will obviously be a major attraction to all the Polish crypto traders out there.

BitBay Pay

BitBay users don’t only get the benefit of the platform’s trading tools. They also get access to some cool extras, the most exciting of which is BitBay Pay.

“What is BitBay Pay?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you! It’s essentially an easy-to-use service that allows you to pay for stuff using cryptos. You can use it online or in physical stores, and it’s reportedly used on over 50,000 payments each day.

You can check out plenty more information about it for yourself here.

Supported Currencies

If I was going to brutally summarize BitBay’s supported currencies, I’d say “good for cryptos, poor for fiats.” That’s overly simplified, of course, but it’s also true!

I’m a positive guy, so let’s start with the good stuff. The BitBay cryptocurrency selection is solid. There are 22 in total. All your old favorites are present and correct, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and so on. There are a few more unusual options too, like Tron and OmiseGO (presumably created solely to use the acronym OMG).

Unfortunately, the flip side of this particular coin is a very small range of fiats. There are literally just three: USD, EUR, and PLN. Still, USD and EUR are the most common fiats to pair with cryptos anyway, and having support for PLN is obviously cool for all the Polish cryptocurrency fans out there.

Basically, the supported currencies right now are just fine, but I’d love to see some more fiats announced in the BitBay news section sometime soon.

BitBay Signup and Login

Like most people, I absolutely love a short and sweet signup process. I’m delighted to report that BitBay’s version definitely satisfies this requirement. At the first stage, there’s literally just one field to fill in:

Once you’ve entered your email address, you simply need to tick three boxes (the one about using your data for marketing purposes isn’t compulsory) and a reCAPTCHA box.

You’ll then be sent a confirmation email. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you’ll be taken to the second stage, where you enter a handful of other details, including a PIN number for using BitBay support:

Finally, you just need to pick the country you’re operating from and your default currency. Then, you’re done.

That might sound like quite a few screens, but the entire process still barely takes a minute to complete.

Logging back into your account again is equally swift. You just pop in your email address and password and tick a reCAPTCHA box.

Interface

I have to say that the BitBay interface seems a little overwhelming at first. As soon as you log into your account, it throws a lot of things at you—a price chart, recent trades, an order entry section, and so on. The screen looks extremely busy.

Once you’ve gotten past that initial feeling, however, you’ll find that BitBay’s layout is genuinely excellent. Almost everything you need is either on that initial home screen or is extremely easy to access from there, courtesy of a nicely streamlined menu on the side.

If you don’t like the busy look of that Exchange page (the default homepage), you can use the more simplistic Dashboard instead. This shows you similar information—including your funds and the basic price action on pairs—but in a more manageable way.

Overall, I found the BitBay interface extremely easy to adapt to. It’s intuitive, attractive, and generally well-thought-out.

Markets

As I mentioned earlier in my BitBay coin review, a nice wide range of cryptos are supported on this platform, but the selection of fiats pales by comparison.

Overall, however, this still means there’s a solid range of markets available. I believe there are over 60 in total; again, based on good ol’ CoinMarketCap. Regardless of the actual number here, this is certainly a pleasingly versatile platform for trading.

Despite the lack of fiats, you can still trade all of the usual most popular pairs, like BTC/USD, LTC/EUR, BTC/ETH, and so on. Live, detailed price charts are available for every pair on the BitBay market (something I’ll explore in more detail in the next section), which is extremely helpful.

Trading Tools

There’s nothing worse than getting to this section of a review and having nothing to write about. Unfortunately, that’s the case with many crypto exchanges(even some of the best bitcoin exchanges suffer from this issue), whose offerings are technically underwhelming.

With BitBay, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I’m going to need to pick and choose what I talk about in this BitBay review. That’s because—within the wider BitBay exchange—there’s an impressive range of tools, all of which have a useful function.

The most exciting is undoubtedly BitBay PRO, which has been designed with the more experienced trader in mind.

This section wouldn’t look out of place on the most prestigious of traditional trading platforms. The layout is sleek, while still conveying a large amount of information, and it’s packed with every feature you could reasonably ask for.

The charts are particularly fantastic. They come with a wide range of indicators and are incredibly easy to manipulate and customize. They’re genuinely some of the best I’ve come across from a crypto exchange.

In addition to the excellent PRO BitBay app, there’s also Bitcantor, which serves as a super speedy way in which to trade cryptos. On top of that there’s also a fiat exchange service (with competitive rates and 0% commission) and public and private APIs.

The trading tools on BitBay are absolutely outstanding. There’s enough here to keep rookie and veteran traders alike happy for a very long time.

How to Make a Deposit

Depositing cryptocurrencies into your BitBay account is easy peasy, as it is with most cryptocurrency exchanges.

You begin by selecting the type of crypto you wish to deposit. Then, you take either the QR code or the deposit address you’re given and use that to send funds from your usual wallet to your BitBay wallet. Done!

While it’s equally easy to make fiat deposits, your options for how to do so are incredibly limited. When depositing USD or EUR, you can literally only use bank transfer. If you’re putting in PLN, you can deposit them directly through the Polish post office, too.

This is one of the most limited selections of deposit methods I’ve encountered, from any cryptocurrency exchange. Bank transfer is probably the most popular method anyway, but it’d still be nice to have a few more options. As it is, this represents a rare dark spot in my BitBay review.

How to Make a Trade

You have two options when making a trade on BitBay. You can either go through the main interface or use PRO.

Either way, your overall options are still the same. You can trade the same pairs and choose between the same order types—market, limit, and fill or kill (which is basically a super-market order).

On the BitBay exchange main interface, you simply select the pair you want to trade at the top, choose your order type, and hit the Buy or Sell button. If you’ve got the requisite funds in your account, the order should be filled immediately (or at least processed, in the case of a limit order).

Things more or less work in the same way when using BitBay PRO. The technical terms are simply used for the order types, instead of the simpler versions on the main interface. Aside from that, the two methods are identical.

So when you use BitBay, that’s how to buy. It couldn’t be easier!

BitBay Fees

While there are trading fees on BitBay—which I’ll tackle in the next section—there are very few other charges to be aware of.

Deposits are almost always completely free. The only exception to this is when you deposit using the Polish post office, in which case you’ll be charged 2% of the deposit’s value.

By contrast, all withdrawals will incur a fee. The exact fee depends on the withdrawal method, and you can check out a full list of them here. To give you some popular examples, though, you’ll be charged 0.00045 BTC for taking out Bitcoin, 0.005 LTC for Litecoin, 4 EUR for euros, and 0.25% for BitBay USD withdrawals.

Nobody likes paying fees, of course, but I’d say these are all very reasonable indeed.

Trading Fees

Generally speaking, BitBay’s deposit and withdrawal fees are nice and simple. When it comes to the trading fees, however, things get slightly more complicated.

Like many cryptocurrency exchanges out there, BitBay operates on a maker/taker system when buying cryptos with fiats. Market makers get charged less, because they grant liquidity to the market, and takers get charged more for doing the opposite.

The exact fees you get charged depend on your trading volume for the past month (you can find a full table here). Still, maker fees will always range between 0.17%–0.3%, with taker fees restricted to 0.25%–0.43%. Either way, those rates are certainly competitive.

The fees are different when it comes to crypto-to-crypto trades, like if you’re buying Futuro Coin on BitBay by using Ethereum. There are no fees whatsoever for makers, and a flat 0.1% charge for takers.

Trading Limits

Trading limits are a way for crypto exchanges to limit their exposure, but they can prove frustrating for big-time traders.

For those particular people, the good news is that there don’t seem to be any trading limits whatsoever in place on BitBay. I found no mention of any whatsoever in the help section of the website, nor in any other BitBay review for 2019.

Security

Every cryptocurrency exchange likes to talk about how committed they are to security. Frustratingly often, however, you’ll quickly find out that there isn’t much actual substance behind those words.

This is not the case with BitBay, whose team does an excellent job of backing up their claim that “safety is our priority.” There’s an entire Safety section on the website, which outlines the security measures in great detail.

BitBay does a great job of helping secure your account. It does this not only through providing plenty of helpful advice, but also with the inclusion of two-factor authentication. Elsewhere, there’s also full encryption (including SSL), manual authorization of all deposits and withdrawals, and cold wallet storage for all cryptocurrencies.

If you were wondering, “Is BitBay safe?” then the answer is a massive yes.

Customer Service

Here we come to perhaps the most problematic area of all for cryptocurrency exchanges in general. Not every exchange is useless in this regard, of course, but the vast majority do struggle.

Yet again, this is an area in which BitBay bucks the trend with style. It has an excellent range of contact options in place. You can call up the helpline every day between 8 a.m.–8 p.m., live chat is available at the click of a button, or you can submit a good old-fashioned ticket if you so desire.

I found the search function—a very important element—to be mediocre, and I don’t like the knowledge base quite so much. The articles are well written and cover a good range of topics, from the basics of “How to Invest in BitBay” to some pretty technical stuff.

In general, though, BitBay blows most of its competition out of the water with its customer service.

BitBay Reputation

BitBay was founded back in 2014, making it one of the younger major cryptocurrency exchanges out there. Its founders—led by financial veteran CEO Sylwester Suszek—have definitely made up for lost time, though.

The business has grown to a size of over 800 employees, has over 800,000 active users, and processes some 547,000 BTC in transactions each year. At the Cryptocurrency World Expo in 2017, BitBay even took home the prize for Best Cryptocurrency Exchange.

As I’ve mentioned, BitBay is a proud Polish platform. Interestingly, though, as of mid-2018, BitBay has actually decided to pack its bags and move from Poland to the more crypto-friendly nation of Malta.

Based on my own experience, it’s no surprise to see that most of the BitBay.net reviews out there are favorable. Like myself, other critics have complemented its easy-to-use nature and security measures (I was unable to find any mention of a major hack on the BitBay platform). One of the most common criticisms is that BitBay isn’t regulated, but this is an issue that plagues crypto exchanges in general.

I couldn’t find enough user reviews of BitBay to form a reasonable overall opinion. I will say, however, that if the BitBay Reddit page is anything to go by, then the general feeling is a positive one.

Conclusion

I could hardly be more impressed with BitBay. Out of all the cryptocurrency exchanges I’ve reviewed, this one belongs right in the upper echelons.

Its general aim is to make cryptocurrency trading easy, and it certainly achieves this. Navigating the interface is effortless, and the trading process is highly streamlined. Bitbay’s options of cryptos to trade are good too, although BitBay is highly limited on the fiat front.

BitBay also achieves the rare feat of being equally suited to both beginners and veterans. It does this by smartly separating the website into basic and more complex sections. The latter, PRO, gives you a range of powerful tools that rivals anything you’ll find from BitBay’s competitors.

Chuck in competitive trading fees, unusually good customer service, and solid security, and there’s a huge amount to like here. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using this platform for my BitBay review, and I highly encourage you to check it out.