Cryptomate Review (2020)

What is Cryptomate? How does the platform work? Can you trust them?

And how does it compare to all the other options we have in the UK?

Check out this Cryptomate review to find out more about this popular UK-based crypto platform.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Advantages

Disadvantages

What Is Cryptomate?

Cryptomate is a UK-based (Cardiff) cryptocurrency platform that was established in 2015 and operates as an unregulated financial services limited company. The founder is William Thomas.

Cryptomate aims to make buying and selling cryptocurrency secure, fast, and easy. Since they were established in 2015, they have:

• Served more than 11,000 customers.
• Fulfilled about 50,000 orders.
• Processed about £16 million in orders.

They’ve got a 4.7* Trustpilot rating, with more than 500 reviews.

Many of the positive reviews highlight how much faster and user-friendly Cryptomate is compared to other platforms, and their friendly customer service.

How Does Cryptomate Work?

When you’re use Cryptomate to buy cryptocurrency, your order may be processed by them OR an approved external vendor.

In either case, it works the same way.

Once you’ve sent your GBP, you should normally receive your cryptocurrency within 2 hours. Cryptomate claims it’s usually quicker than this (within 15 minutes), which seems to match-up with what people have told me and what’s being said in many Trustpilot reviews.

However, Cryptomate isn’t an automated service. Payments are manually checked and processed by someone on the other end. This means that it could take longer to receive your cryptocurrency, especially outside of daytime/evening hours in the UK.

You can also sell your cryptocurrency to Cryptomate. You can sell any cryptocurrency supported by them – but they will accept others on-request too. Once they’ve got the coins, they’ll send GBP via a UK bank transfer. They claim that they whole process should take about 30 minutes.

If you’re unverified, then you can sell £1000 worth of cryptocurrency to them. This limit is increased to £100,000 per day for verified users.

Supported Cryptocurrencies

Compared to similar UK alternatives, you are spoilt for choice with Cryptomate. They currently support 30 cryptocurrencies, which includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Monero (XMR), and many other popular coins.

They’re looking to add new cryptocurrencies to their platform over 2020 and they also welcome suggestions via email.

Payment Methods

The only payment method accepted by Cryptomate is a UK bank transfer.

You’ll need to ensure that you’re using a bank that supports UK bank transfers via the Faster Payments Service (FPS). You can use this tool to quickly check.

Limits

Unlike most popular places, you can buy cryptocurrency on Cryptomate without having to verify your identity. This is limited to £200 per order, but you can make multiple orders (even of the same cryptocurrency if you like).

If you want to buy more than £200 of a cryptocurrency in a single order, then you’ll need to register an account and verify your identity (photo ID and proof of address). This is necessary to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.

If you’re looking to buy more than £5000 in one go, then you will get a better deal if you go through Cryptomate’s OTC service. You can find out more about that here.

The minimum order amount on Cryptomate is £50, which is a little higher than other services.

Fees

Cryptomate’s fees are incorporated into the price that you’re offered for cryptocurrencies.

This is a variable fee, which means that it might be different from one hour to the next. It might also differ depending on the cryptocurrency you’re looking to buy.

When I bought some Bitcoin (BTC) using Cryptomate, I found that I was charged about 5.5% in fees. However, I found that the fees were about 6.5% when I checked the prices of some other cryptocurrencies the next day. Transaction size doesn’t seem to the impact the fee you’re charged.

These are significant fees. You can quickly and easily buy Bitcoin (BTC) from a number of other places using a UK bank transfer without paying more than about 2% in fees.

Take a look at how it compares to some of the other options I’ve reviewed:

Cryptocurrency Wallets

Most places where you buy cryptocurrency let you store in on their platform, but this isn’t an option with Cryptomate.

Before you can buy any cryptocurrency with Cryptomate, you’ll have to provide them with an external wallet address to send the funds over to. I prefer how this works, as I don’t like to leave my cryptocurrency on exchanges. Purchases just go straight into a cryptocurrency wallet you control.

I have a few mobile wallets, but I tend to use my hardware wallet as much as possible. You can get an overview of all your options in my post about the best hardware wallets. Of all the ones I’ve tested out, I prefer the Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano X over anything else that’s currently available.

But if you’re an absolute beginner who just wants to buy some cryptocurrency and not worry about all this faff? Then Cryptomate probably isn’t a good choice for you.

Cryptomate Alternatives

The closest alternatives to Cryptomate are Solidi and Bittylicious.

Each of these three options works in much the same manner. You tell them how much of a cryptocurrency you’d like to buy and then match you up with a pre-verified vendor.

Here’s the main points I picked out from these three:

Solidi is the cheapest of the lot, with fees that are somewhere between 1% and 2%. That’s a competitive rate, especially considering how fast, simple, and easy it is to use. However, they currently only support Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), and Chainlink (LINK).

However, neither Solidi nor Bittylicious allows you to buy much cryptocurrency without getting verified. In contrast, you can buy up to £200 worth of cryptocurrency per order without having to submit any ID to Cryptomate.

Conclusion: Buy Bitcoin (BTC) With No ID

The fees on Cryptomate aren’t great. There are number of better places that you can buy Bitcoin (BTC) more cheaply.

But there are some significant upsides that you should know about.

In particular, I was surprised to find that I could buy up to £200 worth of cryptocurrency per order without verifying anything about myself. All I needed to submit was my name and email address.

And when I asked about this in a live chat, I was told that you could submit multiple orders of up to £200 without needing to verify yourself either. That’s kind of insane. In most places, you can only purchase very small amounts without needing to verify yourself.

While the customer service (via live chat) was a little slow, they did address all the questions I had and were helpful when I had a problem with an order.

Check Cryptomate out for yourself.

Share Your Thoughts

Thanks for reading this Cryptomate review!

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