Bitstamp

Bitstamp Review

What is Bitstamp?

Ever since it opened its doors in 2011, Bitstamp (with England as its domicile country) has provided a reliable gateway into the crypto universe for individuals and institutions worldwide. It is regularly Europe’s biggest exchange by trading volume and offers trading in 20+ cryptocurrencies paired with USD, EUR and GBP as fiat currencies. Beginners can purchase crypto with wire transfer and credit cards (more on that below under Deposit Methods), while experienced traders can use a range of order types and analytical tools.

The exchange is a pioneer in crypto security and regulation, having developed a number of best practices for the industry, like cold storage of assets, multisig wallets and segwit implementation. With a mature approach to the industry, Bitstamp serves as the bridge between traditional finance and crypto.

They claim to have “no hidden fees”, with which they mean that they have transparent volume-based pricing. The exchange also supports all major credit cards and store 98% of all digital funds offline. The exchange is also subject to a yearly audit by one of the Big Four auditing firms (KPMG, PwC, E&Y and Deloitte).

Mobile Support

Most crypto traders feel that desktop give the best conditions for their trading. The computer has a bigger screen, and on bigger screens, more of the crucial information that most traders base their trading decisions on can be viewed at the same time. The trading chart will also be easier to display. However, not all crypto investors require desktops for their trading. Some prefer to do their crypto trading via their mobile phone. If you are one of those traders, you’ll be happy to learn that Bitstamp’s trading platform is also mobile compatible. A new app was launched at the end of March 2021, and you can download it from both the AppStore and Google Play.

US-investors

As of May 3, 2021 Bitstamp announced an expansion into the US market after experiencing a 570% increase in new US customers. The exchange has an entire team based in the United States and offers all customers 24/7 phone support. You can contact Bitstamp customer support team at 1-800-712-5702.

Bitstamp 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 (advanced version) at Bitstamp:

Bitstamp Fees

Bitstamp Trading fees

Bitstamp is one of the exchanges that offers a so called "flat" trading fee. The exchange does accordingly not care about whether you are a taker or a maker. For investors who prefer to pick-up existing orders from the order book, this might be an attractive trading fee model.

Bitstamp’s flat trading fee is, from 1 August 2019, 0.50%. These trading fees are double the industry average, as the industry average is arguably around 0.25%. However, Bitstamp offers trading fee discounts when you have a large trading volume during the preceding 30 days. Trading fees can become as low as 0.00% (nothing) if the relevant trader has a trading volume during the preceding 30 days of more than USD 10 billion. We doubt that there are any traders meeting that criteria, but if they do, they trade for free. The exact trading fee discounts are set out in the below table:

Bitstamp Withdrawal fees

Withdrawal fees are usually fixed and vary from crypto-to-crypto. If you withdraw BTC, you pay a small amount of BTC for the withdrawal. If you withdraw ETH, you pay ETH. The last time we did an empirical study of the BTC-withdrawal fees in the crypto exchange market, we found that the average BTC-withdrawal fee was around 0.0006 BTC per BTC-withdrawal.

Bitstamp charges 0.0005 BTC per BTC-withdrawal, which is below the global industry average (being 0.00057 BTC per BTC-withdrawal according to this report) and a quite competitive fee.

Deposit Methods

At Bitstamp, you can deposit through both wire transfer and credit cards. This can be helpful especially for newer crypto investors and makes Bitstamp a so called “entry-level exchange”.