I am really a big fan of simple and safe exchanges, especially since large centralized exchanges get hacked all the time. So in my opinion it's imperative to eliminate counterparty-risk as much as possible, so instant conversion exchanges are my favorite.
There starts to appear many exchanges of this kind, instant taker exchanges where you can convert 1 cryptocurrency into another in a pretty short amount of time without having to store large amounts in a custodian-like setup. The way this works is that the website is basically a taker, that just connects to makers (Poloniex,Bittrex, etc..) via their API system and buys from the lowest price or sells at the highest price on your behalf. Basically like a trading bot that executes orders at the lowest rate possible.
Changelly is like this, and I have grown to like this exchange very much due to it's simplicity mainly. It's very easy to use it. So Changelly is pretty much my favorite exchange at the moment, both me and my accountant use it to exchange cryptocurrencies.
Well I have not found any drawback to using Changelly, I know this sounds weird but it's really true, maybe the fact that not all cryptocurrencies are available there, but pretty much most of the most popular ones are there, including EDG which I have talked about a lot. So it looks like Changelly was the first quick exchange to add EDG after the main exchanges. It supports currently 61 coins, which is pretty cool, that includes also ETH based tokens like EDG, Golem and others.
Ok so let's see the Benefits then, if I haven't found drawbacks:
Fast:
In my experience the swap can take from anywhere to 3 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the cryptocurrency being traded, and the size of the order, and the confirmation speed of the coin. Usually for amounts like 100-200$ worth, it's about 5 minutes in my experience and from what I've heard. So I guess for most people who exchange quick coins like Steem or ETH, your average trade would take about 4-5 minutes.
Trustworthy:
It looks like the site is operated by the Minergate team which is a very reputable mining pool since 2014 with 46.72 GH/s mining power worth of miners trusting it. Also me personally and my accountant have exchanged here over 25,000$ worth of cryptocurrencies and had 0 issues while doing so. So we can trust them. But it's not just us but also many crypto celebrities like:
- Charlie Shrem:
- Borishaifa: https://steemit.com/money/@borishaifa/thank-you-changelly-spasibo-changelly
- Ryan Dugan: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1435275.msg16867987#msg16867987
- Donald Ness:
Fees:
Pretty decent fees. I personally have not seen anything out of the ordinary. It's about 0.5% (+/- a small variance if the market price changes), so for example for one of my transactions the fee was 0.55%. This is institutional grade fees, I mean on main exchanges you see fees like 0.1% or 0.2% so it's pretty reasonable compared to that and given the convenience it's OK. I mean you would have to sign up to those exchanges, which would be very inconvenient given how much hassle that takes (Changelly only needs an e-mail), and you would have to leave an order open there to buy, but if the price moves up then you can miss it, if the price moves down in another exchange you can miss that too. With Changelly, you let their bot to find you the best exchange rate to position your order in, so you might actually end up buying at lower price, so even if the fee is higher, it might still cost you less in total. This is why I love Changelly.
Privacy:
Well they only need an e-mail and that is also just so that if very rarely something bad happens (which never happened to me though) you can contact the support or they can contact you.
Other than that, they don't need your phone number, they don't need your ID, they don't need your fingerprint. So in this sense it's perfect for privacy conscious users.
Simple:
It's extremely simple to use, just enter your e-mail address there, you don't even need to verify it, but it's advantageous if you want to use it multiple times, they will send your password in e-mail which you can change after.
After that it's just a few more clicks, that's all it takes to swap your cryptocurrencies. So basically you just enter the address where you want to get your exchanged coin, and then you send the coins from your wallet to the address they show you there.
Then wait like 5 minutes and you get your coins in your other wallet. It's really so simple that even your grandma can use it.
The only thing you need to look out for is to make sure that you enter the crypto-address correctly, because a mistyped address can cause financial loss, so I am just using CTRL+C CTRL+V for that reason and then double checking it to make sure it's the correct address character-by-character.
You must work for those crooks. They stole 700 pivx from me. That's $7000 usd. DON'T USE CHANGELLY!
Fantastic job @profitgenerator thank you so much for sharing this detailed info review about changelly.com with all of us. Your input is highly appreciated. Thank you very much again.
Dear @profitgenerator, much appreciate your positive and detailed review! Happy to see our satisfied customers in this thread. Thanks for your trust, guys! Just notice that for the last year we are independent business, but Minergate is still one of our big partners.
Thank you for sharing this info with all of us and keep up the good work guys ;-)
I see, didn't know that.
Hello i'v forgot the memo for my transaction in Steem. My steem name's monkrypto I give to you 13.597 STEEM refund me please !
hey! please, contact our [email protected] team, they will help you quickly!
You can't refund me now ?
Dear, marketing team is here. Unfortunately we don't have permissions for refunds. But have passed your request to support, anyway they need a ticket with all the details to track the issue. Hope for your understanding!
Thank you for this information but steem does not supply these data among which you to speak to me. I contacted them already more than 24 hours ago I always wait for an answer unfortunately...
changelly is amazing company ... thank you Changelly Team for great support
https://www.ripplecoinnews.com/changelly-review-best-cryptocurrency-exchanger
Yes its really cool with simple interface with best prices for conversion. But, Buying BTC directly with Credit card is very costly which you may need to look for reducing prices, not sure what all prices you may incur but costly.
I've found a drawback! @matt-a was also recommending changelly as having some of the best rates. HOWEVER, for all the crypto pairs they offer, Bitshares BTS is nowhere to be found!
With more STEEMIT-related tokens gaining traction (ie. WHALESHARE, BEYONDBIT, etc), perhaps it's time for changelly to revisit and reconsider their decision not to include BTS!
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Does Bitshares offer other cryptocurrencies or only their own inhouse assets?
Becase there is also things like Ether-delta but only for ETH assets.
Changelly swaps all sorts of cryptocurrencies, like ETH, Steem, Zcash, AMP, BAT , DGD and more...
They do have many other crypto assets, such as OPEN.STEEM, OPEN.SBD, OPEN.BTC, the list goes on. But generally, to transact on bitshares, you should hold at least some BTS, which for now I've been mostly picking up off blocktrades.
The bigger issue is that you want to use an exchanger because not all the pairs have enough liquidity to quickly and easily transact. But it does seem their OPEN.STEEM asset has been gaining more traction lately, so SBD->STEEM->OPEN.STEEM could be a simpler option as well.
Or, of course, if changelly can give an even better deal coming back into one of bitshares OPEN.xxx assets, that's an option too. But sounds like it's getting a bit "complicated" now! lol
Aren't those tokens like IOU's? They are not the real tokens, so isn't that more like derivative trading?
In this case I am talking about swapping actual cryptocurrencies not their IOU representatives.
Is it possible to exchange OPEN.BTC into BTC via Bitshares?
yeah, they're issued by CCEDK (part of openledger), and it's pretty easy going OPEN.BTC <-> BTC or OPEN.STEEM <-> STEEM, etc. It just adds more complexity (and additional fees) if you just need some BTS, so the exchange rate has to be really attractive to make it worth the effort.
I'll definitely play around a bit more with it. Maybe I'll get lucky and find a nice cross-pair structure that offers a nice advantage!
I see, well in either case it looks more complicated. With Changelly it's just a couple of clicks.
I have to look into Bitshares though, I have tried using it in the past but I found it hard to use, do you have any tutorials for it.?
I played around a bit with pricing on a 100 SBD conversion (within a 15 minute window or so):
What I found is that just using blocktrades, I would get approximately 554 BTS for 100 SBD.
I asked for a quote on changelly on converting 100 SBD to ETH, and it offered around 0.413179. If I hit the BID on bitshares for OPEN.ETH, that will get me around 567 BTS. If I try breaking the spread (at midpoint) and get filled, I could bring that up to 578 BTS.
If I convert SBD to STEEM on the internal STEEMIT market, then sell OPEN.STEEM for BTS, I would get 571 BTS. If I break the spread and get filled, I cold bring that up to around 574 BTS.
So, depending on how you play it, for small amounts (especially for newbies), option 1's probably the easiest. For larger amounts, it seems option 3 is more ideal, and will still save you at least a few bucks for your trouble.
If you're looking to by ETH to go to coinbase or gemini or some other exchange for eventual fiat or something, changelly's probably the best way to go for that!
Regarding an overview of bitshares, check out this recent post by @eirik. It's pretty thorough, and also includes a video overview of OpenLedger: STEEMGIG - A COMPLETE GUIDE ON HOW TO USE WHALESHARES!
Shape shift is better to use.
not until one of them fix counterparty tokens!
Ive heard from a few people now about changelly this week. I hear really good things about this exchange. I might take a closer look and maybe Ill try it out. Thanks for the post!
I have never liked the concept of trading on centralised exchanges But I am still stuch with it as the Distributed exchanges are not yet ready, they don't have enough volumes or alt coins added. I did try Changelly initially but didn't see it through. Thanks to your post I will reconsider it again.
Yes those are makers, Changelly is a taker. Changelly compares prices on multiple exchanges and positions your order in smaller parts at the best available rate.
So even if there would be only decentralized market makers (replacing Bittrex and Polo), Changelly would still have it's use because it would stil check and execute the trade the lowers price level between the exchanges.
Always wanted to know more about Changelly, I am happy you created this post.
Yes very useful service.... Can trade any amount of funds unlike shapeshift
This looks very promising :) We'll see how it goes. Great insights.
The four factors that make it the best exchange platform. The easier the merrier, Lesser fee, Security and Speed of performance. Very well covered @profitgenerator
Yes that sums it up.
@profitgenrator well said!! Mine also favorite is bitter here is lots of coin for exchange it's really trending on these days and before days the poloneix has 1st choice of the people. But now its upsetting to the people from the service!
Poloniex had some issues now with Steem, they have disabled the Steem withdraws according to this article:
So I would personally not recommend poloniex at the moment. Besides Poloniex asks people for their phone number.
Really thnks @profitgenrator for this information!!
I use it 1-2 times a day , used Changelly 20 times i would guess. It's very easy to use. I like it.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
How do fees compare with shapeshift?
About identical, Shapeshift also uses 0.5%
But changelly has more coins I believe and Shapeshift had Steem exchanges disabled recently along with many other cryptocurrencies, so I think Changelly's uptime is better.
Hello i give to you 13.597 SBD for a transaction but i don't write the memo because a bug can you refund me please
Are you talking to me? I haven't receiced any transaction from you.
No excuse me it is in changelly that I wanted to address but in the panic I did not pay attention...
What I don't get is why you don't get paid back almost evenly. The transaction fee should be way lower for small amount of exchange.
Nah, it actually should be lower for higher amounts of transactions. If people buy in bulk they usually get a discount in price, that is how it works. So that peole would be more incentivized to exchange large amounts.
Besides the network fees in BTC are already through the roof, so using BTC at all is already costly.
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I have read bad reviews about high fees more than 10%. Has anybody used this site and what were the fees?
Why don't they exchange counterparty?
I been hearing mixed reviews!