Mercado Athena Logo
Exchange Review
This exchange has been flagged as inactive. There are many reasons for being flagged as inactive. We recommend you read the text below to understand why Mercado Athena has received the inactive flag.

Mercado Athena

Exchange Fees

BTC Withdrawal Fee 0.0001 • Taker Fee 3.50% • Maker Fee 0%

Deposit Methods

No Wire Transfer No Credit Card

Cryptos (2)

Bitcoin Cash SV, Bitcoin

UPDATE 2 December 2022: Mercado Athena seems to have become inactive. The company didn't release any official statement to confirm the company was folding, however there is no information online to suggest the company is still operational. 

Accordingly, we have marked the platform as "dead" in our Exchange Graveyard. 

To find a reliable exchange where you can start an account, just use our Exchange Filters and we'll help you find the right platform for you.

Mercado Athena is the Chilean counterpart of BitQuick. From a technical perspective, it is essentially the same platform but under another name. The only cryptocurrency you can trade here is BTC.

Something worth considering with this exchange is that it has an industry-exclusive seller’s guarantee. It works as follows. As long as sellers correctly confirm deposits on time (within 3 hours upon request), those deposits will be covered by Mercado Athena in the event of a fraudulent transaction. This is quite rare among cryptocurrency exchanges. Mercado Athena also heavily arbitrate transactions and do KYC/AML evaluations to weed out fraud.

On the date of last updating this review (18 July 2019), the exchange states on its website that it has served 36,296 customers since it started its services.

There is no information at all on the website regarding the team behind the platform. This raises a bit of a red flag in our view. The site has a section called “The Team”, but under that section there’s only the company logotype, being an owl.

Mercado Athena The Team

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 landing page at Mercado Athena, where you also can find the order boxes you need to purchase Bitcoin there:

Mercado Athena Purchase Interface

This exchange’s fees consist primarily of service fees and mining fees.

The fees here are simple to understand. Buyers pay 3.50% of the total order value of the trade as a fee to BitQuick. Sellers pay nothing at all (save for the mining fee mentioned below). So if you’re a seller looking to divest some BTC, this might be a good place to start.

Mining fees are fixed at 0.0001 BTC for BTC-deals (recently lowered from 0.001 BTC). 0.0001 BTC is indeed a competitive mining fee

More on these fees below.

Mercado Athena is different from most top crypto exchanges in the way that it does not offer trading between cryptocurrencies. The only service offered is facilitating buying and selling BTC. You can view Mercado Athena as a market place where buyers and sellers meet in order to agree on transactions. But Mercado Athena takes a 3.50% service fee (from the buyers) and a 0.0001 BTC mining fee. 3.50% is quite high when comparing to centralized exchanges, where the industry average trading fee is 0.25%. It is worth keeping in mind though that the services offered by this platform differ substantially from the services typically offered by centralized exchanges.

Considering how this exchange operates, withdrawal fees are irrelevant. One could, however, view the 0.0001 BTC mining fee (charged in every trade from both buyers, sellers and affiliates for transactions that Mercado Athena sends) as some sort of withdrawal fee.

This exchange does not allow wire transfers or credit card deposits. Only cash deposits are accepted here.