Upbit

Upbit Review

What is Upbit?

Upbit is a South Korean crypto exchange launched in October 2017. The exchange has a fantastic selection of trading pairs, offering trading in 158 different cryptos.

Ownership

There is plenty of information on the exchange’s website on the company running the exchange. This is always nice to see for prospective customers as it makes it less likely that the exchange will just run off with your money.

Upbit Mobile Support

Upbit also has a mobile app. You can download the mobile app on both App Store and Google Play. Most traders do their crypto trading on desktop, but if you prefer to do it via mobile, that’s no problem with Upbit.

Trading Volume

On the day of updating this review (2 December 2021), Upbit had a 24-hour trading volume of USD 5.4 billion, according to Coinmarketcap. On the same day, Binance held the top spot with an incredible volume of USD 30 billion.

Upbit has grown exponentially since March 2020. To put it in perspective, the exchange had a trading volume of only USD 190.5 million on 23 March 2020. 

US-investors

If you are a resident or citizen of the US, you can’t trade here. The reason so many exchanges exclude US-investors are the strict legal rules relating to marketing investments from US-investors. When doing so, the company marketing such investments must comply with numerous American rules regarding registration of marketing materials, various SEC-filings etc. You shouldn’t be too sad if you’re a US-investor though, there are many other venues that offer the type of trading this exchange does. Use our Exchange Finder to find out which alternatives you have.

Upbit 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 Upbit:

Upbit Fees

Upbit Trading fees

This exchange offers a flat trading fee of 0.25%. Upbit does accordingly not distinguish between takers and makers. For investors who prefer to pick-up existing orders from the order book, this might be an attractive trading fee model.

0.25% is in line with the historical industry averages with respect to trading fees. The global industry average has for a long time been somewhere in the area of 0.25%. When comparing with its South Korean counterparts however (Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Coinrail), Upbit’s fees are however on the high end. The average taker fee among these exchanges is 0.139% and the average maker fee is 0.11%.

Upbit 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 approx. 0.00053 BTC per BTC-withdrawal.

Upbit charges 0.0005 BTC per BTC-withdrawal, which is slightly below the global industry average.

Deposit Methods

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

Upbit Security

On 27 November 2019, a hacker managed to access Upbit’s hot wallet. When in, he/she managed to transfer 342,000 ETH to his/her own address. At the time, the ETH stolen was worth USD 53.5 million. But, on the plus side, the exchange will compensate all users that lost Ethereum assets in full.