Bitso

Bitso Review

What is Bitso?

Bitso is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange from Mexico. It has been active since 2014.

US-investors

Regardless of the partly frosty political situation between the countries, Bitso does accept US-investors from trading on its exchange. In any event, all US-investors should still do their own independent analysis of any problems arising from their residency or citizenship. In a worst-case scenario, they could still be prohibited from trading at one or several exchanges that would otherwise be the best cryptocurrency exchange site for them.

Bitso Advantages

Bitso states five different things as their main advantages. First off, they say that the exchange is “easy and accessible”. Second, that you can fund and withdraw from your account easily. Third, the security is strong with the “most effective technology”. Fourth, somewhat tying into the third, they use multi-sig wallets. And fifth, they have powerful APIs, meaning that you can build applications with Bitso. The latter advantage is presumably only interesting to a fraction of the potential users of the platform.

Mobile Support

Bitso offers its trading platform as a mobile application as well. You can download it in the App Store. Or, if you have an Android, in Google Play.

Bitso Trading View

Different exchanges have different trading views. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the views normally have in common is that they all show the order book or at least part of the order book, a price chart of the chosen cryptocurrency and order history. They normally also have buy and sell-boxes. Before you choose an exchange, try to have a look at the trading view so that you can ascertain that it feels right to you. The below is a picture of the trading view at Bitso:

Bitso Fees

Bitso Trading fees

Every trade occurs between two parties: the maker, whose order exists on the order book prior to the trade, and the taker, who places the order that matches (or “takes”) the maker’s order. Makers are so named because their orders make the liquidity in a market. Takers are the ones who remove this liquidity by matching makers’ orders with their own.

Bitso's trading fee for takers is 0.098%. Makers enjoy a slight discount on the trading fee and they trade with a trading fee of 0.075%. These fees are below the industry average which has historically been 0.25% but is now moving towards 0.10%-0.15%. 

Bitso Withdrawal fees

Bitso’s trading fees are a bit on the high end, but the withdrawal fees are on the other side of the spectrum. Bitso charges a dynamic withdrawal fee amounting to approx. 0.00002 BTC when withdrawing BTC. This fee is substantially below the industry average and constitutes a strong competitive advantage against the majority of other top crypto exchanges in the market. The current industry average BTC-withdrawal fee according to this report was 0.00053 BTC per BTC-withdrawal.

Deposit Methods

Bitso offers wire transfer as a deposit method, but you can’t deposit via credit card. This might of course be disadvantageous if you would prefer to use your credit card for any reason.