Bitpanda Review (2022): All Your Investment Under one Roof

BitPanda Overview

Introduction

Founded in 2014 in Vienna, Austria, Bitpanda is one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in Europe, with more than 3 million users and 700 employees. Initially called Coinimal before it changed its name to Bitpanda in 2016, Bitpanda started as a cryptocurrency trading platform and has since added precious metals, securities, and funds trading; and also offers its European users a crypto Visa credit card. Bitpanda has offices in London and Berlin and is looking to branch out even further in the near future.

Bitpanda offers two primary services. The standard service is the Bitpanda brokerage exchange, where users can buy and sell cryptocurrencies, stocks, crypto indices, ETFs, and commodities. Bitpanda Pro is a more advanced platform that is, unfortunately, lacking features for advanced traders.

Bitpanda is primarily European-focused and is available in most countries worldwide, but some features might be limited. It is unavailable outright in the U.S. due to regulatory issues.

Is Bitpanda Safe?

Cryptocurrency exchanges have become prominent targets for criminals and hackers. News reports are often rife with stories about security breaches on crypto platforms. With the emergence of cryptocurrency, it’s fair to say that crypto exchanges can be likened to modern-day banks, and security has always been a top priority for any bank or financial institution.

So, this begs the question, has Bitpanda ever had a security breach? We could find no history or evidence to suggest so, and it seems Bitpanda has a flawless and clean slate.

We’ve summarised its crucial security features below.

• Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations – as with any financial institution worldwide; it is standard practice to know users’ identities and other personal information before letting them use its services
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) – One of the most essential steps in security. It is not compulsory on the Bitpanda exchange, but we highly recommend enabling this simple yet effective security feature
• Cold wallet storage of assets and funds – offline wallets that hold most of its users’ funds. These wallets are highly secure and cannot be accessed by any hackers as they’re offline. Bitpanda keeps a small portion of assets in hot wallets for easy access and liquidity on the exchange
• SSL encryption and DDOS protection – ensuring any sensitive information is kept secure and private

Getting Started

Assets & Pairs

Bitpanda has support for more than 170 cryptocurrencies and 46 trading pairs. Bitpanda supports the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, like BTC, AVAX, and ADA. As far as offerings go, we think Bitpanda still has a long way to go to compete with other rivals like Binance, which lists over 500 coins, and KuCoin, which has more than 600 coins.

You probably won’t find the next 10x or 100x coin using Bitpanda. Still, the current offering will suffice for beginners looking to learn about crypto or more advanced traders looking to trade the more significant currencies.

One big plus about Bitpanda is the fact that it has many non-crypto assets on the platform. In addition to cryptocurrencies, there are hundreds of stocks, ETFs, and metals. This makes Bitpanda attractive if you are looking to buy some crypto in addition to other investments.

One of the standout listings on the Bitpanda brokerage service is its crypto indices. Bitpanda claims that it’s the world’s first crypto index, and you can choose to invest in BCI5 (Bitpanda Crypto Index), BCI10, or BCI25, which is the top 5 top 10, or top 25 cryptocurrencies based on their market size and liquidity. The list is automated by Bitpanda and rebalanced every month to stay on top of the top cryptocurrencies. With cryptocurrencies being inherently risky, this could be an excellent way to lessen the volatility and risk of your investments.

The summarize Bitpanda’s offering, it is disappointing if you are looking purely for crypto, but intriguing if you want to build a diverse portfolio on one platform.

Sign-up / Verification Process

The Bitpanda sign-up process was a bit longer than you can find on other exchanges, but nothing that should scare you away. To start, you’ll need to find the sign-up button on the top right of the website or the bottom of the mobile app and follow the email and mobile number verification steps. As part of its KYC policies, Bitpanda must verify your identity before you can use its services, which ensures no fraudulent activity on its platform.

Bitpanda’s only accepted form of I.D. is a passport which can be tedious. If you’re like us, we usually have our passports tucked away somewhere for safekeeping instead of readily available and nearby, like a driver’s licence or I.D. card. You’ll be asked to upload a copy of your passport and speak a few words into your phone or laptop camera for them to ensure your passport photo and face match. Despite this, verification was still relatively quick, and we were up and running in less than 20 minutes.

Funding Methods

Whether you’re using Bitpanda to buy, sell, or trade crypto, Bitpanda should cover all of the bases for funding your account. Bitpanda supports funding from numerous fiat methods and has support for crypto deposits from external wallets. The following fiats wallets are available: Euro (EUR), U.S. Dollar (USD), Swiss Franc (CHF), British Pound (GBP), and Turkish Lira (TRY). It’s easy to deposit fiat currency, just click on the Deposit button on the top right of the desktop or the top centre of the mobile app and choose your corresponding wallet.

You need to deposit fiat currency into a wallet before buying crypto; you can’t just make easy one-off payment purchases like you can with Crypto.com or Coinbase. We found this slightly annoying, as more often than not, you’ll always be left with a bit of fiat currency left over after purchasing your crypto, similar to how every household has that one bowl full of loose change that fills up over time. There is also a minimum deposit limit of EUR 25, or currency equivalent, for any fiat method.

To fund your account using crypto, Bitpanda makes it simple. Just click on the same deposit button or on the deposit button for the asset you wish to deposit, and either scan the Q.R. code provided or copy the wallet address. Deposit times vary between different assets; in our experience, it usually takes around 10 minutes, and standard blockchain fees apply.

Withdrawals

Withdrawing your fiat currency or cryptocurrency is pretty straightforward. To withdraw fiat currency, you’ll need to start by selling your cryptocurrency and depositing the money into your relevant fiat wallet. This will be the same wallet you funded your account with. If it’s your first withdrawal, you’ll need to create a pay-out account depending on which payment provider you’re using. From there, enter your withdrawal amount and confirm. Withdrawals are set to a minimum EUR 25 limit or the equivalent in other currencies.

To withdraw crypto, navigate to the Send option on the top right corner of the desktop platform, or find it in the Trade option in the mobile app, and select the asset you want to withdraw. Enter the amount and the address, and confirm it all before sending. The timing of withdrawals is dependent on the blockchain; once all confirmations are fulfilled, your crypto will be available in your wallet.

Overall, withdrawing both fiat and crypto from Bitpanda isn’t a hassle, and we got our funds out quickly and safely.

Fees

The fees on Bitpanda are annoyingly ambiguous. It isn’t clear how much Bitpanda charges for buying and selling cryptocurrency, with Bitpanda only saying that its premiums are already included in the offered prices. We would much rather understand the makeup of these fees, as we want to be able to know the full extent of our investment.

We tested this in real-time and bought $50 worth of cryptocurrency on Bitpanda and Coinbase, and to its credit, Bitpanda was cheaper by almost $2. So although Bitpanda isn’t transparent with its fees, they seem to be cheaper than direct competitors. We still wish Bitpanda would tell us what fees we’re paying.

As mentioned in the funding section, before you can buy cryptocurrency, you need to add fiat to the corresponding fiat wallet, and these fees and limits for the different payment methods are as follows:

Euro Wallet

• SOFORT – 1.80%
• SEPA Bank transfer – Free
• Visa debit card payment – 1.80%
• Mastercard debit card payment – 1.80%
• EPS – €0.25 +2.00% (€2.00 max)
• Giro Pay – 1.50%
• Neteller – €0.90 +3.60%
• Skrill – €1.00 + 3.60%

GBP Wallet

• Bank transfer – Free
• Visa debit card payment – 1.50%
• Mastercard debit card payment – 1.50%
• Neteller – £1.00 + 3.60%
• Skrill – £1.00 + 3.60%
• Rapid Transfer – 1.00% (£3.00 max)

USD Wallet

• Visa debit card payment – 1.50%
• Mastercard debit card payment – 1.50%
• Skrill – $1.00 + 3.60%

Bitpanda Pro Fees

In complete contrast to the “included” fees on the regular Bitpanda, we were impressed with Bitpanda Pro’s maker/taker fee structure. It is some of the most competitive we’ve seen on the market, with a maximum of 0.1% maker fee and 0.15% taker fee. For comparison, Gemini charges a maximum maker/taker fee of 0.40%, and fees can reach up to 0.50% on Coinbase. Maker/taker fees are cheaper the higher your 30-day trading volume is. This fee structure is almost on par with advanced exchanges like Binance or OKX, which is surprising for a beginner-oriented exchange.

The Platform

Platform & Ease of Use

Bitpanda offers two different platform options to buy, sell and trade cryptocurrencies, and both are available from your desktop or an android/iOS mobile app. You can buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly from Bitpanda through a simple, clean, and easy-to-use interface. Bitpanda has made it easy to navigate between your dashboard, portfolio, and current asset prices from the homepage.

Bitpanda also has a platform that more experienced traders would find appealing called Bitpanda Pro. It features more advanced trading features and has everything you would expect from a more advanced interface, including pro charting features and a live order book. If you intend to get serious about crypto, we recommend you to learn this platform – if only to avoid the opaque fees of the regular Bitpanda service.

Mobile App

We found Bitpanda’s standard mobile app very beginner-friendly. You are presented with three main options to trade, deposit, or view your savings plans from the home screen. Clicking on ‘Trade’ takes you to all the funding and selling options. You can also navigate between your assigned favourites, top movers for the day, your asset portfolio, and the current market prices from the home screen. For simple buying and selling, this app will do just fine.

Bitpanda Pro also has a mobile app, and it has everything the desktop platform has in a compact and convenient portable form. When you log in to the app, you’re taken straight to the markets page, and clicking into a trading pair gives you advanced charting features and an overview of your orders and the market history. You can also navigate to your coin balances and user setting from the bottom panel of the app. We enjoyed the Pro version of the app, and think it is well executed. This interface can become very crowded and complicated on a smartphone, but we feel Bitpanda has done a good job with its Pro app.

Trading Features

Bitpanda has all the basic features you would expect from a cryptocurrency broker. For beginners and spot traders looking to simply buy and sell crypto, Bitpanda has you covered.

Experienced traders might feel a bit limited while using Bitpanda Pro. It has basic advanced trading features like a live order book, graphs and charts, drawing tools, and 105 different indicators. Order types include market, limit and stop orders, good ’til cancelled, immediate or cancel, fill or kill, and good ’til time. But it’s somewhat limited by its lack of support for margin and leverage, short selling, and staking tools, among other advanced features.

Your trading strategy will dictate if Bitpanda Pro is for you or not; if you just want to do some crypto trading, Bitpanda Pro is well designed, quite cheap, and fast. But if you are looking for some more advanced features, Binance still trumps the market with its feature-packed platform.

Volume & Liquidity

Volume and liquidity can tell us a lot about an exchange. The higher the volume and liquidity, the more buyers and sellers are interested in trading crypto assets. The more volume on an exchange, the more liquid the assets are, and the more competitive the prices become.

According to CoinMarketCap, at the time of writing, Bitpanda has a 24hr volume of $11 million USD. This volume is relatively low, but unless you plan on trading very large sums, you’ll be fine.

Notable pairs like ETH/EUR, BTC/EUR, and USDT/EUR all have high CoinMarketCap liquidity ratings of 652, 655, and 559, respectively, but there are less liquid markets like PAN/EUR at 232 or BEST/BTC (BEST – Bitpanda’s native coin) at 242.

Bitpanda has a liquidity score of 581, which is well above the average score of 380 on CoinMarketCap. If we were European-based, we would have no hesitation using Bitpanda based on these metrics.

Additional Features

Bitpanda Swap

Bitpanda has a feature that allows you to instantly and securely swap one digital asset for another, as long as the assets are both supported on the Bitpanda exchange. All fees and premiums for sales and purchases are already included in the prices, so while you again won’t know exactly what fees you’re paying, you won’t need to get confused with any hidden or complex fee structure. It is available on both desktop and mobile versions and can be found under the ‘Trade’ option.

Bitpanda Savings

You can start a savings investment account with Bitpanda and set a specific amount out of your fiat account every day, week, or month. We’ve only ever seen this on Crypto.com before, and it’s a great way to put away any extra capital you might want to invest without having to go through the admin of funding and buying crypto every time. All assets on Bitpanda are supported; you just need to key in the amount and periodic date you wish your purchase to happen and let Bitpanda do the rest. You can also set up multiple plans, so diversifying your portfolio is simple.

Bitpanda Plus

For those investors with a bit more capital to invest, Bitpanda has an exclusive service called Bitpanda Plus. It has been developed for investors who wish to trade more than any default limits for every other investor using the exchange. You can get more competitive fees and receive individual support if you run into snags. Bitpanda also has an over-the-counter (OTC) trading service for any individual or institution wishing to trade more than € 1 million.

Bitpanda Crypto Debit card

Bitpanda has a crypto debit card. We’re starting to see a lot more exchanges develop support for Visa cards, and it’s an excellent way for you to spend your crypto without needing to convert it to fiat currency first. Having a visa crypto debit card gives you access to more than 54 million pay points in more than 200 countries. With Bitpanda, you also don’t pay any card or monthly account fees.

The Bitpanda Wallet

Unfortunately, Bitpanda has no separate offline/cold wallet service. That being said, if you’re a beginner and just looking to do some spot trading, this won’t matter, as you can still use Bitpanda’s standard integrated hot wallet without any hassle. Crypto storage in a hot wallet has its benefits, as transactions are instant and devoid of any fees. If you are looking for a long-term storage solution with extra security for your crypto, you’ll need to use a different exchange or external wallet service.

Staking

After not offering staking for a long time, Bitpanda has finally added 10 coins to their staking offering – including popular staking coins like Cardano, Solana, or Polkadot. This is a welcome addition to Bitpanda, as the lack of staking was enough to not recommend Bitpanda. Now, with 10 coins and relatively attractive staking rewards, Bitpanda’s staking offering has surpassed Coinbase’s, which isn’t saying much given the poor staking offering on Coinbase, but still. There are better, more diverse staking offerings out there, but at least Bitpanda is now in the conversation.

Lending/Borrowing

Bitpanda has no support for margin or leverage trading.

Customer Support

Customer support is vital in any exchange or financial service. We prefer it if an exchange has direct contact support so we can chat with an actual employee that can offer immediate assistance. Unfortunately, Bitpanda fell short in this regard, and we had to submit a request via its support centre.

In all honesty, we were disappointed with Bitpanda’s response time, with an email response just over 24hrs after our initial query. The issue we had was rectified with a few back-and-forth emails, but we feel it’s not good enough. To give you context, Gemini’s customer support got back to us in 37 min. A 24h response time isn’t terrible – your bank will often take longer than that to get back to you, but it’s not stellar, especially for a beginner-friendly exchange.

NFTs

Bitpanda does not offer any support for NFTs, and we couldn’t find any indication to say it would in the near future either.

Conclusions

Conclusions for Beginners

Bitpanda is an affordable and beginner-friendly European crypto exchange. Beginners will find buying and selling cryptocurrency very easy with Bitpanda’s basic brokerage service and support for various fiat currencies. Both the desktop and mobile platforms are intuitive and clutter-free, and the smaller offering of crypto will help beginners focus on the basics of buying and selling.

If you want to learn about crypto and do a bit of trading, we recommend using Bitpanda. Even though the opaque fees are annoying, it was still cheaper than Coinbase. If all you’re looking to do is buy and hold crypto, stocks, ETFs, or indices, Bitpanda makes it simple enough.

Conclusions for Experienced Traders

Bitpanda Pro has its downsides for experienced traders, with a lack of support for features like leverage and margin, short selling, and staking. If these features are essential to you, we recommend trying an exchange like Binance or KuCoin. But if all you want is to trade on a spot exchange without exotic strategies, Bitpanda will have your needs covered. The advanced interface is a pleasure to use, as is the Pro mobile app.