Mercado Athena

Mercado Athena Review

What is Mercado Athena?

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.

Industry-Exclusive Seller's Guarantee

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.

36,000+ Customers

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.

No Information on Team

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

Mercado Athena Fees

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 Trading fees

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.

Mercado Athena Withdrawal fees

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.

Deposit Methods

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