Beginner friendly, but
severely lacking in features
Users that are new to cryptocurrency exchanges tend to fall with the usual recommendations (such as Coinbase) until they’re more confident, experienced or own a decent amount of coins to start trading in something like GDAX or Binance.
Revolut aims to be an alternative for newcomers, and we’ll be exploring what it offers to see if it’s good enough to get you started, so stick around for this review. Let’s get started.
What does it offer?
Despite being an exceptional banking app, the cryptocurrency exchange part of Revolut is pretty barebones compared to its competitors. TheRevolut crypto exchange features the following:
- Support for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.
- Support for more than 120 fiat currencies that you can trade with.
- Android and iOS app.
- An easy to use graphical interface.
And that’s pretty much it. As you can see, the exchange part of Revolut leaves a lot to be desired so far. But who knows? It’s relatively new; they might improve it throughout the course of this year.
What does the community think of it?
Despite being barebones, the general consensus towards Revolut is fairly positive because what’s there works quite well. However, there are a lot of negatives opinions for the exact same reasons. Revolut is not only too simple for its own good, but it also has some jarring restrictions that will make dedicated traders stay away from the app.
Let’s begin with the fact that the app supports only 3 coins, which is quite disappointing when you compare it to any of its competitors. Add the fact that you can’t send the coins you buy to your personal wallet (or to another exchange for that matter), and then add the fact that at the expense of lower prices thanks to VWAP (or volume-weighted average price) short lived price fluctuations don’t have an influence on the prices of the Revolut exchange. The combination of those elements makes Revolut an app that makes trading quite simple, but extremely restrictive for people that want to really get into trading.
Fees
Fees in Revolut are flat and straightforward: for each trade you simply get charged a 1.5% markup on the average exchange price.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Extremely intuitive and easy to use.
- Great for a beginner.
- Supports an impressive amount of fiat currencies.
- Buying and selling is almost instant.
- The mobile app lets you trade on the go.
Cons
- Supports a very low number of coins.
2. Does not allow you to send funds outside of the Revolut exchange.
3. VWAP makes advanced trading impossible.
To sum it up
A lot of positive things can be said of Revolut’s app, but their cryptocurrency exchange is not one of those. It aims to be a good entry point for beginners, but ends up being disappointingly mediocre due to the severe lack of features it offers on that front.
If you’re serious about investing and trading, you should look for another exchange, because so far, Revolut doesn’t offer anything special enough for you to be okay dealing with its restrictions.
About Revolut
Even if you don’t know much about cryptocurrency you might be familiar with Revolut, as its cryptocurrency exchange is not the only thing it offers.
Founded back in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut initially started as a digital banking alternative that allows you to exchange over 120 different fiat currencies without any of the hidden fees and even offers interbank currency rates.
The service has been praised quite a bit for being so efficient and easy to use, and that’s no surprise when you consider that both Storonsky and Yatsenko have a lot of experience under their belt. Storonsky was a trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, while Yatsenko was a developer for Credit Suisse and Deutsche bank. Together, they developed Revolut and have obtained a substantial amount of funding throughout the years, up to the point of it being valued at $1.7 billion (£1.2b) as of April of 2018.
Thanks to this funding, Revolut was able to add several new features throughout the years, support for more fiat currency, and in December of 2017 a cryptocurrency exchange.
