What is CoinJar?
CoinJar is one of the best Australian cryptocurrency exchanges headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria. CoinJar was launched in May 2013, and over the years it has managed to gain a tremendous popularity in Australia, all while constantly introducing new features to keep up with the rapid progress of the blockchain ecosystem.
CoinJar is generally considered a well-respected marketplace of digital currencies, which is proven by the 400,000+ active users and the $1.5+ Billion volume of traded assets. It’s safe to say that CoinJar is the go-to crypto exchange for most if not all Australian blockchain investors, and its popularity is expected to keep growing in the future.
Coinjar Features
The Coinjar trading platform currently supports over 50 cryptocurrencies for Australians to buy, sell and trade. These include all of the major Layer 1 protocols like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, Binance and many others. The exchange also offers a Coinjar Debit Card that allows users to spend crypto using Visa or Mastercard.
Outside of this, Coinjar does not have many other important or value adding features for investors. Their platform lacks crypto staking, NFT support and many other features that other platforms like CoinSpot offers for Aussies.
Is CoinJar Safe?
CoinJar is generally considered a high quality, secure cryptocurrency exchange. Over 90% of all funds stored on the exchange are held in offline cold wallets which means that they are practically impossible to be stolen by hackers. Furthermore, CoinJar has a phenomenal history of security, since the exchange has never lost any cryptocurrency to hackers so far.
CoinJar employs a variety of tools to secure the users’ funds and private data in the most bulletproof way. These tools include full encryption, additional security layers, regular independent security audits, two factor authentication and much more.
CoinJar Founders
The two Co-founders of Coinjar are Asher Tan and Ryan Zhou from Melbourne, Australia. Both Asher and Ryan have extensive backgrounds in computer science, engineering and finance at the highest level.
CoinJar Supported Coins
CoinJar supports a large number of digital currencies. Aside from Bitcoin (BTC), and the most popular altcoins such as Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP), CoinJar also supports a large number of ERC-20 and DeFi tokens..
CoinJar Fees
Generally speaking, the main fee on the CoinJar cryptocurrency exchange is the 1% flat fee applied to all trades, which is quite high by the crypto industry standards, especially compared to the decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, which have much smaller fees. This is just as expensive as the trading fees on CoinSpot, which are notoriously high for instant buying.
However, the 1% should be treated as a maximum fee, since most of the time the fee actually paid by the users will be much smaller. For example, while trading crypto for fiat and vice versa, the fee will usually not be higher than 0.05%. Furthermore, the fees are relative to the volume of cryptocurrency traded by the user, so people who use CoinJar to trade large volumes of digital currencies will pay even smaller fees.
Deposit and Withdrawal Fees
The CoinJar cryptocurrency exchange has no withdrawal fees at all, which means that you can always transfer your cryptocurrency assets to your personal crypto wallet without paying any fee. When it comes to the deposit fees, they vary depending on the method. While depositing crypto is completely free, users who deposit with cash or card will have to pay a small fee.
Deposit Fee Depending on the Payment Method:
- BPAY: 0%
- PayID / NPP: 0%
- Crypto: 0%
- Cash: 1.5%
- Credit & Debit Card: 2% fee
User Interface
One of the main reasons for the massive popularity of the CoinJar cryptocurrency exchange is its very accessible user interface. The CoinJar UI is very clear and neatly designed, and all the features can be accessed effortlessly. Because of that, using CoinJar will be familiar and unproblematic even to people with no previous cryptocurrency experience.
CoinJar Wallet Security
CoinJar's cryptocurrency wallet is considered very safe because of the fact that the vast majority of the users’ funds is stored in cold wallets - offline wallets located in various secure locations. Because the customers’ assets cannot be accessed without permission, the possibility of hackers stealing your funds is extremely low.
What’s also very important is the fact that CoinJar claims to back all the funds in users’ wallets with reserves at all times, which guarantees that the exchange won’t face any liquidity problems in the foreseeable future.
Which Countries Are Supported on the CoinJar Exchange?
While CoinJar is an Australian-based crypto exchange, it can be used not only by the residents of Australia, but also by the citizens of the United Kingdom. Although the CoinJar website is accessible globally, blockchain investors from other jurisdictions might not be able to fully enjoy all of the exchange’s functionalities depending on the local laws and regulations in their country of residence.
Is KYC Required to Use CoinJar?
All centralized crypto exchanges require a KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti Money Laundering) verification, and CoinJar is no exception. In other words, to unlock the full functionality of CoinJar, you will be asked to verify your identity, which will require you to send a scan of your ID or some other similar document.
The Bottom Line
CoinJar is a very well-respected, popular and established cryptocurrency exchange. Although headquartered in Australia, CoinJar is also enjoyed by many blockchain investors from the United Kingdom. Although the number of supported cryptocurrencies might be relatively low compared to other popular exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase, CoinJar keeps gaining new users because of its excellent security history and user-friendliness.
