The History of Bitpanda
While originally founded in late-2014 under the name Coinimal by Eric Demuth, Christian Trummer and Paul Klanschek in Vienna (Austria), the company quickly changed their name and had achieved a full rebrand by early-2016. Thus, the more palatable name Bitpanda was conceived.
Bitpanda is an exchange for digital assets (including cryptocurrencies, precious metals and other forms of finite resource) and allows trading between different national currencies such as USD, EUR, CHF, and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Iota (and many others too).
At the end of November 2017, the Bitpanda service supported and implemented SegWit wallets and transactions. SegWit is a technical upgrade of the Bitcoin blockchain protocol, which creates the basis for future improvements in the network (specifically, by reducing transaction fees and increasing scalability).
As of mid-2018, Bitpanda had partnered with the Austrian postal service (Österreichische Post) offering vouchers for use on Bitpanda’s exchange platform that can be purchased with cash.
In April 2019, Bitpanda received a Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) license from the Austrian Financial Market Authority. The license allows Bitpanda to provide payment and new Fintech services in the Euro zone (on an unrelated note; Bitpanda closed a $52 million Series A funding round from Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel, in September of 2020).
There is little published online about Bitpandas/Coinimals early beginnings, and it is hard to find out about their early successes and tribulations without doing a seriously deep dive into financial publications, crypto-blogs and even some less reliable sources, which is always a bit worrying.
Suffice to say they have had their share of both, and while I always find a lack of transparency cause for concern in any industry, there are also reasons why Bitpanda have established themselves as one of Europe’s most diverse crypto-exchanges with a variety of payment options.
The Pros
Bitpanda was designed specifically for newbie traders who want an easy to use interface to access cryptocurrency.
That being said, the platform has also expanded to accommodate the needs of professional traders (while Bitpanda Pro was created for seasoned traders and businesses with a high demand for more advanced tools, as well as to integrate the platform with trading bots).
Bitpanda manages a number of positive viewpoints to prospective customers; it is a reputable company, offers a fast service and serves as a cheap alternative to other cryptocurrency exchanges out there.
The team seems to have built a good reputation within the community since the company was rebranded in 2016 and it’s very refreshing to find an exchange with such positive customer feedback.
The Bitpanda multi-currency wallet gets top marks on security – as it uses multi-signatures and 2-factor identification to prevent unauthorized use. The wallet is a hierarchical deterministic, which provides secure inter-operability, backups and restores – which means as an open source wallet, it is sure to benefit from new security and services features. It is for this reason that Bitpanda has never been hacked.
Additionally, unverified accounts can use the free Bitpanda wallet and send and receive funds among other Bitpanda users for free.
All of this, along with a user-friendly system, instant price alerts and friendly and easily communicable support are what has led Bitpanda to become an industry leader of its kind, particularly within Europe, but in the rest of the world too.
The Cons
As we said, BitPanda is mostly well-known in the EU, though you can sell your coins from anywhere around the world. However, you can only purchase them via BitPanda from Europe.
Some methods of payment are restricted to specific areas, which means that you won’t be able to access all of them. The only available methods of payment for international customers are Skrill and Neteller.
Unlike many of the competitors of the global market in cryptocurrency exchange, the website is only available in two main languages – English and German.
One of the chief complaints about Bitpanda that we have seen from various users is a lack of transparency concerning their fees, which can be rather high (Bitpanda fees for buying crypto are 1.49% and 1.29% for selling it). It is important to note that these own fees are incorporated into the price in real time which is one of the aspects that separates Bitpanda as being less transparent than some other exchanges).
SOFORT and credit cards have a 2% fee however, which is relatively low, though again it is important to note that Skrill has an additional fee of ~3.77%, with Neteller’s fees being a bit lower. All in all, using a voucher or Giropay is the cheapest methods for buying Bitcoins on BitPanda.