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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 Stronghold has received the inactive flag.

Stronghold

Exchange Fees

BTC Withdrawal Fee 0.000369 • Taker Fee 0.25% • Maker Fee 0.00%

Deposit Methods

No Wire Transfer No Credit Card

Cryptos (3)

Stellar, Bitcoin, Ethereum

UPDATE 5 April 2019: On 5 April 2019, Stronghold closed its door for retail customers. However, it has not closed entirely. Rather, the platform is as of 12 April 2019 exclusively open to developers and institutional clients. The reasoning was the following:

“This change will disable access to our exchange for retail customers — afterwards, the trading platform will only be available to users of our platform APIs, financial institutions, and other registered businesses. The move allows us to scale up our efforts to build payment products for institutional clients.” 

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Stronghold is a New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange.

This exchange is owned and operated by a company named Stronghold Institutional Services Ltd. They proudly state on their website that they are “compliant with regulatory reporting” and that they are also a fully compliant New Zealand Financial Service Provider. They also describe themselves as a “financial institution building an asset-agnostic global payment and trade ecosystem”.

We believe that US-investors are permitted to trade here as we have not received any contrary information. However, if you’re from the US and you’re interested in Stronghold, we still urge you to do your own analysis of any issues or problems arising out of your US-residency or US-citizenship.

This exchange focuses on the Stellar-cryptocurrency, also known as Lumens. The exchange has the following trading pairs (that had any market capitalization on the day of updating this review – 22 February 2019):

BTC/USDS;

ETH/BTC;

ETH/USDS;

LTC/BTC;

LTC/ETH;

LTC/USDS;

SHX/XLM;

XLM/BTC;

XLM/ETH; and

XLM/USDS.

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 Stronghold:

Stronghold Trading View

This exchange’s trading fees for takers are 0.25%. This fee is exactly in line with the global industry average.

However, it is the maker fees that really distinguishes Stronghold. Stronghold charges the makers in a trade 0% (zero). This is extremely competitive. 

Also, this trading platform does not charge any own withdrawal fees at all when you withdraw BTC. They do however charge network fees. There are exchanges out there that pay the network fee for a withdrawal themselves, but they are a rarity. Accordingly, that this exchange only charges the network fees when you do a withdrawal is a competitive edge for this exchange.

This trading platform does not accept any deposits of fiat currency. This means that new cryptocurrency investors (i.e., investors without any previous holdings of cryptocurrencies) can’t trade here. In order to purchase your first cryptocurrencies, you need a so called entry-level exchange, which is an exchange accepting deposits of fiat currency. Find one by using our Exchange Finder!

It can be worth noting here that Stronghold stores “the vast majority” of all digital assets in cold storage. The exchange also uses multi-sig technology for maximizing security.