Crypto.com Exchange

Crypto.com is one of the largest digital assets exchanges globally with more than 10 million active users and support for 250 cryptocurrencies.

The exchange is also one of the biggest crypto sponsors in the entertainment and sports industries by becoming an official partner of the UFC, the NFL, the NBA, and more.

Founded in 2016, Crypto.com has expanded its services to just more than trading crypto assets.

The exchange currently provides a wide range of blockchain-related products, including a prepaid crypto credit card, a decentralized exchange, borrowing and lending services, and a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace.

Is Crypto.com Exchange Limited To Expert Traders?

Crypto.com’s interface can be overwhelming, so it isn’t quite suitable for beginners. New users might be better off with a more beginner-friendly exchange like Coinbase or Kraken.

Another problem for beginners is that Crypto.com doesn’t offer any kind of educational content.

For the more advanced, Crypto.com has a wide range of crypto and DeFi products, including staking crypto to earn interest, spot, margin, and derivatives trading with 10X to 100X leverage, over-the-counter trading (OTC), and more.

Pros & Cons of Crypto.com

Let’s lay out some of the pros and cons of Crypto.com.

Pros:

  • Support for a broad spectrum of cryptocurrencies
  • Provides a wide range of crypto-related products
  • Users can earn interest with their crypto holdings at a higher rate than most high-yield-generating protocols

Cons

  • Poor customer support
  • Geographic restrictions
  • Confusing and hard to navigate interface
  • Lack of educational content for beginners
  • High fees are applied unless users hold and use a certain amount of CRO —the exchange’s native cryptocurrency
  • Record of previous hacks —the exchange suffered a $30 million exploit in January 2022

Our Take On Crypto.com

Crypto.com is a good option if you want to do more than just trade cryptocurrencies.

The broad range of crypto-related products and crypto assets available for trading is definitely appealing to advanced customers.

However, I wouldn’t recommend Crypto.com to beginners.

The exchange’s dashboard and trading interface are quite complex, and despite having a website relaunch

Crypto.com Fees

Like most exchanges, Crypto.com uses a market-taker fee system, which basically works like this: the makers are responsible for placing buy or sell orders at a quoted price, and the takers accept the orders (executing them).

Crypto.com charges fewer fees to market makers and higher fees to market takers.

However, the exchange might reduce fees depending on our trading volume and how many CRO tokens we have. As such:

  • High-volume traders: 0.04% for makers and 0.1% for takers without CRO staking.

Here’s another feature we need to keep in mind: CRO is Crypto.com’s native token.

By staking at least 5,000 CRO (which at the time of writing is around US$1,300) you qualify for a discount on trading fees. So to wrap up —the higher your trading volume and CRO staking, the lower the fees.

Crypto.com doesn’t charge deposit fees, nor are there any kind of hidden costs using the exchange.

Crypto.Com Card

One of Crypto.com’s most popular products is the Crypto COM Card —a prepaid VISA card that allows customers to earn a percentage of what they spend as cash-back.

You can choose from five different cards —each one having different benefits.

For instance, the Midnight Blue Card is free and provides a CRO reward of 1% on card spending.

But if we upgrade our card to Ruby Steel by staking 350 EUR worth of CRO, we receive 2% of CRO back and free Spotify.

Despite the card’s benefits, Crypto.com has been under fire for reducing cash-back rates and imposing monthly caps due to “long-term sustainability.”

This enraged Crypto.com’s community and caused the CRO token to fall more than 11% after the announcement.

So you might want to study this carefully before upgrading your Crypto COM card.

Is Safe is Crypto.com?

Crypto.com leverages numerous security measures to keep the platform secure, including hardware security modules (HSM) and multi-factor authentication (MFA.)

Besides, the exchange has insurance of $750 million to reimburse users in case the platform suffers an exploit.

The exchange suffered a security breach in January 2022, where nearly 500 customers were affected.

Crypto.com said $15 million were stolen, but the company later admitted that the total stolen funds amounted to $35 million.

This is why it’s important to set up your account with a strong password and enable 2FA. Also —it’s best to keep your funds out of centralized exchanges as online businesses are subject to cyber-attacks.

Trading Options

Crypto.com’s trading interface is provided by TradingView, so it means we have access to all the professional tools and resources of the popular charting platform, which is a great future for advanced traders.

We have the charting interface at the left, where we can change an asset’s time frame, and add trend lines, indicators, and more trading tools we can use.

Next to it is the Order Book section, which shows you the list of buy and sell orders for a particular asset —in the example above is USDT/BTC.

And at the right, we can place our buy and sell orders via spot, which is directly buying or selling an asset at current market rates, or margin trading with a leverage of 10X.

There are 250 cryptocurrencies available for spot, margin, and derivatives trading with leverage limited at 10x and 50x for derivatives.

We can also set up a spot trading bot that buys low and sells high in certain price ranges.

However, users should be careful when configuring a trading bot, as it needs to be consistently tested in order to work properly.

Banking at Crypto.com

Crypto.com allows users to fund their accounts using cryptocurrency.

There’s a broad list of cryptocurrencies you can use —250, including Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tokens and stablecoins, mainly:

  • Bitcoin (BTC)
  • Cardano (ADA)
  • Ethereum (ETH)
  • DAI Stablecoin (DAI)
  • Dogecoin (DOGE)
  • Tether (USDT)
  • USD Coin (USDC)
  • Solana (SOL)
  • Shiba (SHIB)
  • Uniswap (UNI)

You can also choose a credit or debit card. Linking a bank account in the US requires you to go through a Know Your Customer (KYC) process in order to verify your identity.

This includes full name, email address, phone number, and Social Security Number (SSN).

If you don’t verify your account, you are not able to deposit or withdraw funds.

Crypto Site Experience

As aforementioned, navigating through Crypto.com via desktop can be complex compared to the mobile app —which provides a more user-friendly interface.

However, if you’re an advanced trader, you will have a lot of options to explore within the dashboard.

For instance, at the top left of the header, we have the markets tab, which includes spot and margin trading (up to 10x leverage) and perpetual and futures markets and their respective list of available assets to trade.

We also have the search bar to find a particular market, and next to it, we have the lending tab.

The lending service allows you to borrow loans with a maximum duration of 12 months using cryptocurrencies or stablecoins, which you can also use as collateral.

You can borrow up to 3 outstanding loans at any time.

The exchange has a Loan Calculator that helps you determine the loan amount, the collateral amount, and the Initial Loan-to-Value (LTV) —the ratio of your loan to the value of your collateral.

This means, for instance, if you were to take $100 worth of USDT using DAI as collateral with an LTV ratio of 50%, you would have to put $200 worth of DAI as collateral.

Be aware that lending isn’t available for all countries —we disclosed the list of restricted jurisdictions in another section.

Recently, Crypto.com added OTC (over-the-counter) trading —also called: off-exchange trading— for institutional and VIP clients.

The service is called OTC Portal and it allows customers to trade assets in a broker-to-dealer way, outside of formal, centralized exchanges.

Mobile App Experience

If you’re more comfortable trading crypto on your phone, the mobile app is quite straightforward, easy to use for everyone, and the navigation speed is decent.

The app is downloadable via the Play Store or App Store, depending on which device you use, but it’s essentially the same.

You can also find it on the exchange’s own site.

The app offers all the tools and resources needed to start trading a wide range of crypto assets.

You can also check your portfolio, and the list of trending crypto assets in the market, deposit via credit or debit card, or request a Crypto.com account.

The signup process is simple —type your credentials and submit your identification document next and a selfie.

Once done, navigating the app is quite easy.

The first thing that will pop out is the dashboard, naturally, which will show your total balance in USD (depending on which country you’re in.

If you’re in Europe, it defaults to EUR.) You can change the payment currency in settings, up to 20 fiat currencies are available.

At the bottom, we have four sections to navigate:

  • Home: where you can see your total funds and a list of the most popular assets in the market and their current prices.
  • Accounts: Crypto.com allows the user to set up multiple sub-accounts besides their primary account.
  • Track: here you can check the price action of a certain asset over time.
  • Card. here you can request a Crypto.com Visa Card if you’re eligible for it.

In Settings, which is at the top left, you can enable 2-Factor Authentication (2FA.) Enabling 2FA is highly recommended as it provides an additional layer of security to your account in case it’s ever compromised.

(Note to editor: the app isn’t available in my country. Tried to use a VPN but didn’t work).

Registration Process

At the top right of the homepage, we’ll see the Android and iOS app download options.

But in order to sign up and start trading via desktop, we’ll have to click on Products and then choose Exchange Home, which will take you to the trading hub where we can see different cryptocurrencies available for trading and other crypto-related products.

On the top right, we’ll find the Log In and Sign up options. Registering is quite straightforward, but it’s preferable to do it via mobile app as you need to have an ID document —whether a passport, driver’s license, or ID Card, and submit an image of your credentials and a selfie in order to start the verification process —which can take a while, ranging from one to two weeks for Crypto.com to authorize your documents and actually granting access to your account.

If you already registered via the mobile app, you can continue as a Crypto.com app user.

Once logged in, the Crypto.com dashboard offers numerous crypto-related products and services, from lending, staking, spot, and margin trading.

Crypto.com Global Restrictions

Crypto.com offers its services to more than 10 million customers in 90 countries.

At first, the exchange had the US on its list of restricted countries, but as of March 2022, the exchange announced the launch of its US-based platform, and now offers its services to at least 49 US states, mainly:

  • Alabama
  • California
  • Delaware
  • Florida
  • Georgia
  • Hawaii
  • Minnesota
  • New Jersey
  • Rhode Island
  • Texas

Crypto.com is not available for everyone —there’s a selected number of countries in its list of restricted jurisdictions. Some of them are:

  • Afghanistan
  • Albania
  • Bolivia
  • Cambodia
  • China
  • Ecuador
  • Georgia
  • Iran
  • Venezuela
  • US State: New York

There are a number of countries in which the lending feature isn’t available: Some of them are:

  • Australia
  • Austria
  • Brazil
  • Cyprus
  • Denmark
  • Estonia
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Italy

Crypto Customer Support

Customer support isn’t Crypto.com’s greatest feature.

The exchange only offers email and live chat support, so it’s extremely limited.

Crypto.com hardly makes the cut on Trustpilot —having 2.2 out of 5 stars with its poor customer service.

There’s a long list of customers complaining about slow responses and little to no help in resolving account issues, such as lost funds and blocked or hacked accounts.

It should be noted that the exchange received a large inflow of negative reviews after the January exploit —thousands of users were complaining about poor customer support and misleading statements about the exchange’s security protocols.