Coinmama

REVIEW

Pros IconPros

  • Fine range of cryptos
  • Solid security
  • Buying process is simple

Pros IconCons

  • Fine range of cryptos
  • Solid security
  • Buying process is simple

Trading has been around since the birth of commerce, and as economic systems and technology have developed, so have the things that people trade. Stocks and shares, commodities, fiats—if it’s something with financial value, people will trade it.

Cryptocurrencies made waves when they first became popular in the mid-2010s. They were new, exciting, and different. Pretty quickly, they were also—as you would expect—traded!

A series of websites were created to make it easy for people to acquire cryptos. One such site is the subject of this Coinmama review. Coinmama was founded back in 2013. Given that’s the year in which Bitcoin first cracked the $100 barrier, you could say they timed it pretty well.

Since then, Coinmama claims to have been used by some 1.25 million people, across 188 different countries. But there are many more options for buying cryptos nowadays. Is Coinmama still relevant? Has it held its own against the newer competition? It’s time to find out.

Coinmama’s Key Features

Coinmama is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to purchase cryptos. Their service is intended to be easy to use, fast, and safe. Their headquarters are currently based in Bratislava, Slovakia, but they were originally founded in Israel, and their CEO, Asaph Schulman, hails from startup-mad Tel Aviv.

Here are some of Coinmama’s key features, which I’ll look at in more detail later on in this Coinmama review:

Security

When it comes to using a new exchange, Coinmama knows that security is first and foremost in users’ minds. They offer full encryption of your personal details, and they don’t store your credit card details online. Interestingly, they also don’t have their own wallet service, meaning you can choose a high security wallet of your own in which to store your money.

Additionally, this exchange is licensed and regulated, and it has never been hacked. So is Coinmama legit? The answer is yes.

Markets

Coinmama might not offer the widest range of cryptos to buy in the world, but all the heavy hitters are represented. On Coinmama, you can currently buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple, amongst others. They plan on adding other cryptos over time.

Trading Limits

One of Coinmama’s calling cards is its high trading limits, a favorite in many Coinmama reviews. Users can buy up to $5,000-worth of cryptos in a 24-hour period, and a maximum of $30,000 across an entire month.

Your purchase amount is also determined by the level of your account—see the “Trading Limits” section below. The daily and monthly limits remain the same, however.

Liquidity

If your trades involve other actual people, then there’s always a risk you won’t be able to buy your cryptos at the time—and therefore at the price—you’re really after. Fortunately, that should never be an issue here. When you buy from Coinmama, you’re actually buying from the exchange’s own personal inventory. No third party is involved at any stage of the process.

Simplified Buying Process

Cryptocurrencies can be a confusing business, as can the simple act of trading for the inexperienced. This exchange is aware of this and strives to make Coinmama safe and an overall painless process.The buying process is broken down into three easy-to-follow steps, which are explained clearly on their website.

Supported Currencies

Coinmama offers a middleground when it comes to the number of cryptocurrencies it supports. It’s not as limited as a website like Paxful, for example, but it also falls short of “every crypto under the sun” exchanges like Kraken.

Coinmama heavily pushes Bitcoin and Ethereum on its front page. In fact, its “How It Works” guide says to “choose either Bitcoin or Ethereum.” While these are the two most high-profile cryptocurrencies, it is a little strange to pretend those are the only two cryptos available.

In addition, though, you can purchase Bitcoin cash, Ripple, Litecoin, Ethereum classic, Cardano and Quantum. On their FAQ page, Coinmama also says it’s “working on additional crypto currencies.”

As for fiats, by default Coinmama’s prices are displayed in either USD or EUR—their preferred payment currencies. It should be noted that while it uses USD, Coinmama is not available in all of the USA. Though technically they do accept all currencies, a conversion fee may be incurred if you don’t use dollars or euros.

Coinmama Signup and Login

Having a quick and easy signup process should be high on any cryptocurrency exchange’s “to do” list. You want to get potential users through the door—and spending money with you—as quickly as possible, after all. Coinmama’s registration process ticks this box nicely.

They only ask for a few basic pieces of information off you, which includes which country you live in, strangely. It’s quite unusual for a crypto exchange to ask this at such an early stage and may turn off the people who want anonymity right away. Most newcomers probably won’t mind, however.

It’s worth noting in this Coinmama review that another slight difference between it and most exchanges is that you must verify your email address before proceeding. Other websites—smartly, in my opinion—let you look around their platform first. Regardless, after verifying your email address, you’re allowed to start exploring Coinmama in more detail.

If you log out of your account at any time, logging in isn’t difficult, but it could be easier. This is because, strangely, Coinmama doesn’t offer an option to remember your details for you; not even your username. Again, though, this is a minor inconvenience.

Interface

The quality and intuitiveness of its interface can make or break any cryptocurrency exchange—if users don’t like or understand the layout quickly, they’re unlikely to stick around for long. Coinmama’s interface is okay, but I certainly don’t love it, which I have to mention in my Coinmama review.

The design is simply a bit dull to look at. Light grey text on a white background is never a great idea, the basic blue and white color scheme is boring, and there are very few graphics to help break up the pages.

I also found it generally awkward to navigate the interface. There’s no catch-all home page showing all the options at your disposal once you’ve logged in like there is when you’re logged out. Instead, you’re simply directed back to your profile: a tiny screen which—to begin with—literally just tells you whether or not you have any orders.

Hover over the buy button, and you can only visit the pages for each crypto individually. Again, how hard would it be to have a broader page that showed all your options at once?

Even when you’re on the individual page for a crypto, you’re shown a bunch of predetermined options by default—buy $100 worth of Bitcoin, buy $250 worth, and so on. Want to choose a custom amount? Rather than simply being allowed to input the amount yourself, you have to use a slider! What a fun feature!

The whole interface smacks of Coinmama trying to reinvent the wheel. All users want is to have their options presented to them in as clear a manner as possible, with minimal need to navigate around.

Coinmama’s interface won’t be enough to put you off on its own, but I certainly wasn’t impressed in this Coinmama review.

Markets

Coinmama isn’t really a platform where you trade cryptocurrencies against each other, or against fiats. In fact, seeing as you can’t actually sell your cryptos here (though that feature is “coming soon,” reportedly), it’s not really a “trading” platform at all. Not along the lines of eToro or GDAX, for example.

Here, you simply buy cryptocurrencies, which you then hold elsewhere. Those cryptos can only be bought using fiat currencies, and not by using other cryptos. As I mentioned earlier, Coinmama prefers that you use USD or EUR to make these purchases, with all other currencies being subject to Coinmama conversion fees.

Trading Tools

There are very few trading tools at all on Coinmama. And by “very few” I really mean “none at all.” They don’t even give you the current USD/BTC price, which even the most basic of crypto buying platforms, like Paxful, usually do.

I understand that this isn’t supposed to be an actual trading platform, but something, anything, to help guide people’s purchases would be very welcome. How difficult would it be to have a basic price chart, for example?

In fact, given that the price of Bitcoin can fluctuate so rapidly—sometimes by hundreds of dollars per day—a price chart should be a necessity. Coinmama says that they “lock the crypto rate at the time of purchase,” but how is the user supposed to know whether or not they’re getting the price they want without live price data?

Not for the first time in this Coinmama review, I must say that this—in isolation—might not be enough to put people off. These missed opportunities do seem to be adding up, however.

How to Make a Deposit

On Coinmama, you don’t deposit money into your account. Instead, you simply buy the crypto directly, using one of the approved payment methods.

As for those payment methods, well, your options are pretty slim. In fact, they’re literally just the bare essentials. The only way to pay for your crypto is by using a credit or debit card, and even then it must be Mastercard or Visa. There’s no option to use PayPal, or even bank transfer.

In this day and age, when you’re offering a product as technologically advanced as cryptocurrencies, that’s pretty surprising, to say the least.

How to Make a Trade

A smooth buying process is obviously imperative for any self-respecting cryptocurrency exchange. That’s the reason why users have come to your site, after all.

In fairness to Coinmama, they generally receive high marks from me here. To place a trade, all you have to do—once you’ve been verified—is head to the page of the crypto you’re looking to buy. Then you select how much you’d like, give Coinmama the address of the wallet you want the cryptos sent to, fill out a quick form, and then confirm the sale.

Are you wondering, “How long does Coinmama take to verify?” Seeing as you can’t actually buy anything until your ID has been checked out, you should be. Based on user reviews, the verification should only take a few hours, as long as you start the process during business hours. If you start it out of hours, or on the weekend, it’ll obviously take longer.

Having said that, there have also been numerous complaints about it taking far longer. Check the Coinmama Reputation section below for more details on that. Unfortunately, there’s no indication on the website of a precise Coinmama verification time.

Coinmama Fees

Many cryptocurrency exchanges charge fees for both depositing and withdrawing money into your account. Thankfully, since you don’t technically do either of those things on Coinmama, you don’t incur any such fees.

Don’t get too excited though, because when it comes to actually buying those cryptos, there certainly are fees to be aware of. The grizzly details on those are revealed in the next section.

Trading Fees

There’s no other way to say it. The Coinmama fees for buying cryptos are high. Really high. All purchases on Coinmama are subjected to a whopping 5.9% fee. 5.9%! That means that if, for example, you wanted to purchase $500 worth of Bitcoin, you’d need to pay a $29.50 fee on top.

Pretty expensive, right? Well, that’s not all! In addition to that, Coinmama also charges you a 5% processing fee for credit or debit card payments—which are the only two options.

That means that, when all’s said and done, you’ll end up paying a charge of nearly 11% extra when buying cryptos from Coinmama. Considering there are exchanges out there from which you can purchase them without any fees at all—again, like the aforementioned excellent Paxful—that’s pretty close to being a dealbreaker.

Trading Limits

For this section of my Coinmama review, I should mention that there’s a pretty even split in the industry between exchanges that simply let their users trade as much as they like, and those who impose trading limits. Coinmama falls into the latter category.

First up, they have both daily and monthly buying limits. The daily limit is $5,000 USD/EUR, and the monthly limit is $20,000 USD/EUR. Why is it the same for dollars and euros, despite the euro currently being worth $1.15 at the time of writing, and €5,000 therefore being worth around $5,750? This Coinmama review really can’t answer that.

On top of that, there are also trading limits based on the level of your account. Level 1 requires ID verification, including a selfie of you next to the ID, with a written note also in the photo. With Level 1, you can purchase up to $15,000 in crypto, while still being subject to the daily and monthly limits.

To reach Level 2, you must provide a secondary ID and a utility bill. Do so, and you can buy up to $50,000 of crypto. Finally, to qualify for level 3, you must fill out a form and contact Coinmama directly. Level 3 users can purchase up to $1,000,000.

If you’re strongly committed to the idea of anonymity when dealing in cryptocurrencies, then this obviously isn’t going to suit you. If you don’t mind submitting ID verification, however, then these are some pretty high spending limits.

Security

Compared to traditional financial institutions, very few, if any, cryptocurrency exchanges are household names. Accordingly, it’s only natural to want some assurances that your money will be safe with them. In this case, you need to know, is Coinmama safe?

It certainly provides all the basics you’d hope for from any exchange, including strong encryption of users’ personal details. It doesn’t store card details on its servers or website, which should give customers additional peace of mind.

Most intriguing, it actually doesn’t offer its own wallet to store your cryptos. Instead, it allows you to choose a wallet on a different website, with as much security as you like. Some might see this as passing the buck, but I actually think it’s a pretty smart idea.

The one negative is that it is only regulated in Slovakia. That’s certainly no knock on Slovakia itself, but with an exchange this size, you might hope for a more prestigious license.

Regardless, one thing’s for sure: Coinmama is no scam.

Customer Service

It’s fair to say that my Coinmama review hasn’t exactly been glowing so far. Can it reclaim some momentum, courtesy of its customer service? The short answer is … no!

There’s no immediate way to contact Coinmama, either via live chat or phone. The only ways to get in touch are by email or its Facebook page. To be fair, the response times are decent, usually averaging less than 24 hours. Not as quick as the two hours mentioned on the website, but not bad! Still, it would be nice for users to have access to some emergency help if necessary.

Aside from that, there’s also a knowledge base on the website. There aren’t a huge number of articles there, but the big topics are covered. The articles are generally helpful, although the length and detail they go into does vary substantially.

Coinmama’s Reputation

Coinmama has a mixed reputation online. Professional Coinmama reviews tend to be slightly positive in nature. They also, however, focus in on the high fees.

When it comes to user reviews, the general consensus is more negative. On Bittrust, for example, they have an average of 2.18/5, after 136 reviews. Most of the complaints seem to focus on the pretty intense verification process, with some verifications taking an awfully long time and others being rejected without explanation. There’s still plenty of positive feedback, though, and you always have to take user reviews with a pinch of salt.

One inarguably good thing about Coinmama is that they never seem to have been hacked. Clearly the security precautions they’re using are holding up well.

Conclusion

If you’ve stuck with my Coinmama review all the way through, you can probably guess my overall thoughts on them as a cryptocurrency exchange.

Coinmama isn’t a disaster, by any means. I like its approach to security, making a trade is easy enough, and there’s a decent (though not exceptional) range of cryptos available to buy. The sizeable trading limits also ensure this is an exchange suitable for the high rollers, as well as the more casual traders. And sometimes you can find yourself an online Coinmama coupon to help combat its high fees.

There are a lot of issues here, though. Much of the time, it feels like Coinmama simply can’t get out of its own way. Everything seems a little too complicated, with too many rules in place, and too many hoops to jump through.

This particularly applies to the verification process, which is strict to say the least, and has put a fair few customers off. The interface, too, feels both dull and needlessly complex. It’s certainly not intuitive. The lack of payment options is also baffling.

Worst of all, however, are the fees. Everything else is important, of course, and something like good security, for example, could be a deciding factor between two pretty close exchanges. When other exchanges offer low fees, however, or even no fees at all, I just can’t see why people would choose to pay an extra 11% per trade with no benefits in return.

To sum things up in this Coinmama review, it’s a legit cryptocurrency exchange, but there are better options out there.

Pros IconPros

  • Fine range of cryptos
  • Solid security
  • Buying process is simple

Pros IconCons

  • Fine range of cryptos
  • Solid security
  • Buying process is simple
eToro

Many of the cryptocurrency trading platforms I’ve looked at are solely concerned with trading cryptocurrencies.

Paxful

Now that cryptocurrencies have essentially become mainstream, a large industry is quickly building up around trading them.

Changelly

Did you know that there are now some 200 cryptocurrency exchanges out there? Cryptos might have started off as cool, alternative, underground currencies, but they’re certainly not any more.

FAQ

?What is Coinmama?

Coinmama is a cryptocurrency buying service, offering Bitcoin, Litecoin, and various other options.

?Are there Coinmama coupons available?

You will sometimes be able to find a Coinmama coupon code online, which usually grants a discount.

?What payment methods does Coinmama support?

You can only use Mastercard and Visa credit and debit cards for payments.

?Can you use Coinmama in the US?

Coinmama currently operates in 23 states, but you cannot use Coinmama in New York.