Coinspot is a crypto exchange catering to the Australian market. The brokerage service offered covers like 100 different altcoins, each of which can be purchased using Australian dollars at OK prices. There are also six different exchange markets available, though liquidity renders them unusable for the most part. The platform looks nice and their AUD/alt brokerage service is not too much more expensive than can be sourced elsewhere in the market, making Coinspot is a reasonable product for the Australian altcoin community. If you are sensitive to pricing or considering a costly purchase, we would recommend buying bitcoin at an exchange like btcmarkets and then using one of the numerous international altcoin exchanges, which are much cheaper.

Opening an account

In order to deposit or withdraw AUD, you need to provide:

• A copy of the front and back of your driver’s license OR Australian Passport OR Proof of Age Card OR Birth Certificate
• Proof of Residency such as Utility or Phone Bill OR Rates Notice OR Bank Statement
• A high quality photo of yourself holding a written message stating: “I, [name] submit this photo to apply for a Coinspot account to trade digital currency, and my code is xxx”, and then sign.

Once these documents have successfully been submitted, Coinspot will review and call you directly to ensure your identity.

Once verified, these are your deposit limits by payment type:

There are no limits on withdrawals, but please do give Coinspot a bit of a heads up if you are planning a very large transaction.

Security

First things first – Coinspot has never been hacked and they offer 2-factor authentication to secure your wallet. However, the exchange offers a TON of coins for sale, and there is an integrated wallet for all of them. And lest you think they simply integrated all the coins on, say, the Coinomi wallet to ease their operational overhead – they did not. Many coins are not supported on Coinomi or Jaxx, and many are not ERC 20, meaning that securing them all is an ambitious undertaking.

We recommend transferring your coin to a third party wallet after purchasing.

The Coinspot Platform

Coinspot is nicely designed, both in terms of aesthetics and user experience. The dashboard provides a snapshot of your funds both in AUD and each particular crypto wallet, and gives quick access to the most popular and quickest moving crypto.

A click on any of those crypto categories will take you to the Coinspot broker interface. Coinspot charges a 1% fee to handle these brokerage orders, but the spot prices quoted is generally right around the USD market price.

Our spot check on even some of the more obscure alts showed all in fees of approximately 1%. See below, the difference between the buy and sell order, the mid point is slightly more than 1%.

There is simply no superior alternative to buy and sell with AUD any of the 100+ cryptos offered by Coinspot. And if you would like to trade between cryptos, this option is also available, and a 1% fee is right around the price you might expect to pay from Changelly or Shapeshift.

However, Coinspot does offer exchange markets on btc, eth, ltc, doge, neo, and powr. The exchange markets offer a lower trading fee of .25%, but liquidity is an issue, and so it might be harder to fill your trades.

As you can see above, there is a pretty wide spread between buy and sell orders. Traders will have to pay a good premium for any substantial order.

There is a “pegged order option which helps ensure your market order does not fill at prices far outside of the market’s mid rate.

Simply configure the percentage you are willing to buy or sell above and below the mid market rate and Coinspot will match your order as it comes.

Fees

Mobile

Coinspot does not yet have a mobile app, but the platform has been designed to work extremely well on your mobile device.

Bottom Line

Coinspot is a decent altcoin brokerage in the Australian market. We would not recommend using it’s exchange which suffers from an almost complete lack of liquidity,, but their 1% brokerage fee is fine, though the pricing can get a bit high That should perhaps be expected considering their AUD markets against dozens of crypto. You can, of course, get better overall pricing if you exchange trade via btcmarkets and then transfer to Binance for your altcoin trading, or simply exchange your AUD to USD and take your pick of the best exchanges, but what you gain in pricing, you lose in convenience.

We see this as an excellent starting exchange for the Australian bitcoin community, though more serious traders will no doubt prefer more liquid, global exchanges for day trading. As always, we would recommend sourcing alternative wallets to hold your crypto purchases.