Remitano Peer-to-peer Digital Currency Exchange Review

Remitano provides a P2P marketplace that escrows funds to allow users to safely and easily buy and sell cryptocurrencies. The UI is simple and friendly, and customer support is offered 24/7. The company was developed by a team of banking, FinTech, software, and digital currency professionals and is registered in Seychelles. 

The exchange launched all the way back in 2014, making them one of the longest-serving platforms. Their founders and founding team are primarily Vietnamese. What makes Remitano interesting is that they primarily serve international markets such as Malaysia, China, Cambodia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Vietnam, Australia, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

The Positives

• Remitano allows users to pay via credit card, as long as their country is compatible with the Simplex service. Note that Simplex does not permit countries on the FATF blacklist – currently just North Korea and Iran.
• For people entering the crypto space for the very first time, the absolute simplicity of Remitano can be seen as a positive. There is no order book, there are no charts, and there are no graphs, there is simply an order box with a buying price and a selling price.
• Wire transfers are permitted on Remitano.
• A 0% maker fee provides a lot of opportunities for speculative high selling, as we will explain later.
• Remitano has become the platform with the largest Bitcoin trade volume in Nigeria, which will help pave the way for other African nations. The platform introduced a Nigerian Naira fiat wallet in May 2020 that allows for instant trades, making things much faster than before. Deposits are limited up to N300,000.
• Since February 2020, users whose payments are not completed within 15 minutes will be refunded 50% of the transactional charge as part of the platform’s pledge to be faster and more efficient.
• 24/7 customer support is available to help with user queries and problems.

The Negatives

• Remitano does not permit users from Vietnam, Nigeria, and Malaysia to pay by credit card as these countries already have enough liquidity by bank transfer.
• Very few altcoins are listed, proving to be a massive disadvantage against competitors like Changelly.
• Remitano is not your typical crypto exchange, since users can set their own prices, they are typically far more expensive than the actual market price, meaning you must pay a premium to use the service. This puts buyers at a notable disadvantage.

Which cryptocurrencies can you find on Remitano?

• The platform hosts 6 major cryptocurrencies:
  • Bitcoin
  • Ethereum
  • Tether
  • Bitcoin Cash
  • Litecoin
  • Ripple

Some more information on fees

Withdrawal fees are just 0.0002 BTC, way below the industry average of 0.0005-8 BTC

Allow us to explain how a deal goes through:

Andrew places an order to buy 1 BTC for $20,000. Boris places an order to sell 1 BTC for $22,000. Christina then decides to sell 1 BTC for $20,000, and the order with Andrew is fulfilled. Christina is the taker, and so she is charged a 1% fee, however, if she had decided to sell her 1 BTC for $21,000, there wouldn’t be an order to match it, and so like Boris, she would be providing liquidity. If Christina was the first to make the sell order for $21,000 and later Derek came along to purchase it, then Christina would be the maker, and she would not be charged a fee.

The displayed ‘buying price’ is thus inclusive of the 1% taker fee, so a listing of $20,200 means that the seller is selling for $20,000 and the exchange is taking $200. The seller will then pay Remitano 1.01 BTC to receive their $20,000. The buyer will pay $20,200 to receive 1 BTC exactly, with no further fees. 

The advantage to makers, or sellers, is that they can ‘go fishing’ and place a speculatively high sell order on the platform with 0 fees.

First-time buyers on the platform are limited to 2 BTC for their primary purchase. 

The final say

Remitano presents itself as one of the superior options for users in a number of countries that do not have the same international exposure to exchanges and markets as say, China, Singapore, the US, or the UK. The platform doesn’t even require government IDs for most transactions, since it is a peer-to-peer network, so it can be possible for unbanked individuals, people with no ID, or those who want to protect their anonymity to use the service. Of course, if funding a trade by bank transfer, personal information cannot be avoided.

Being a P2P network in emerging markets, some of the market pairings are entirely empty, with zero liquidity, and this issue of liquidity continues throughout the site, as even the pairs that do have liquidity seem to have very high prices for buyers. The platform also has a reputation for scammers, but thanks to the funds being put into escrow, this problem has more or less been negated. 

What we do really like is that Remitano can effectively exist as a currency exchange bureau for crypto, allowing people to locally convert fiat-for-crypto and vice versa. Sending crypto internationally is far cheaper than sending international transfers, so Remitano allows this and a way of converting back to the local currency at the other end.