Cointree is an Australian bitcoin brokerage that makes its way by offering an excellent user experience. Their verification process takes five minutes, provided you have an ID handy. The design is excellent, making buying and selling intuitive even for the most novice of customers. After choosing your deposit method, Cointree simply converts your cash to bitcoin when it hits their accounts, and sticks it in your Cointree bitcoin wallet. From there, you can pay bills with bitcoin, exchange it into altcoins, or transfer it on to your own secure wallet.     

For larger purchases, CoinTree is probably not the best choice.  The fee of 3% is well above pricing at any liquid exchange, though if you are stuck on utilizing audbtc markets this is a good on ramp.

Opening an Account

Account verification is never a fun exercise.  However, Cointree should be commended for letting online verification company Green ID handle this on their behalf.  All too often we see exchanges attempt to handle KYC internally and fail miserable at providing a timely and user friendly experience.  Green ID is seamlessly integrated and the online verification is usually sorted within about 5 minutes.

Once you are verified, the following options are available to fund your account.

Note that Cointree allows purchases as low as $20. Customers are limited to a total of $10,000 in purchases per day.

Cointree platform

Cointree is a beautiful brokerage.  It is easy and fun to use regardless of your experience level.  

If you click on the  +/- icon takes you to the buy slip, which provides you the details for all deposit options.  Note that your bitcoin purchase it calculated from the moment the cash actually hits CoinTree’s account; the rate displayed when you select your deposit amount is an estimate and is not locked in.

Cointree sources you the best rate they can find and adds a 3% fee on top.  Note that this fee covers all costs, including the deposit transfer. Once the transaction is complete, your bitcoin is transferred into your Cointree wallet. We would recommend transferring bitcoin you mean to hold to your own personal wallet.  However, there are a few interesting things that can be done directly from Cointree.

First, Cointree integrated a Shapeshift widget which allows for the conversion of your bitcoin into a number of different alts.  Cointree takes no additional fee for this service. If you decide to buy altcoins, please be aware that you will need to set up an external altcoin wallet.  We recommend Coinomi for this purpose.

You are also able to pay any common Australian bill in bitcoin if you would like. This might appeal to any bitcoiners living off the banking grid – if that describes you, you might be interested in simply opening your CoinTree account and transferring in some bitcoin for bill payment.

Might be better elsewhere if:

You are looking to buy a substantial amount of bitcoin.

Cointree is extremely user friendly and targets new bitcoin buyers rather than market veterans.  That ease of use comes at a price – 3% as a matter of fact, which is a lofty sum. More active traders will likely prefer alternatives – maybe for the initial conversion from AUD to bitcoin, definitely for regular day trading.  

Bottom Line

Looking for an easy and comfortable way to exchange your Australian Dollars into Bitcoin?  CoinTree is a very simple solution, though many will be turned off by the 3% fee.  In terms of simplicity, simply transfer your AUD to CoinTree and when it hits you will instantly be credited with the appropriate amount of bitcoin.