Coinbase review

Coinbase was launched in 2012 and has expanded rapidly to provide services to its nearly 100 million users across more than 100 countries. Today, it offers more than 100 tradeable assets, including favorites like:

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Dogecoin
• Avalanche
• Polkadot
• Solana

Coinbase also offers some cool features outside of buying and selling crypto. For example, users can hold certain assets on the site and automatically earn interest. The company also recently launched its first NFT marketplace to compete with OpenSea.

We put together this article to help you answer that question. It provides a comprehensive review of Coinbase’s services so that you can determine whether it’s right for you.

So without further delay, let’s get into it.

Is it safe to buy on Coinbase?

Coinbase is one of (if not the) safest crypto exchanges to buy from. It’s a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange and even offers $250,000 in insurance for any USD funds you hold on the platform.

More than 98 million people use Coinbase with some regularity. So if there was something seriously wrong with the platform, it would’ve absolutely been discovered by now.

Fees

One of the downsides of Coinbase is the website’s fees. These range from 0.5% to 10% per transaction – which is higher than competitors like FTX US and Gemini.

You may be able to deal with these fees if you enjoy the platform otherwise and don’t make crypto purchases very often. But if you want to dollar-cost average into something like Bitcoin, then Coinbase’s fees will eat into your purchasing power quite a bit.

For example, let’s say you wanted to purchase $10 of Bitcoin every day. To do that on Coinbase, you would pay $0.99 in fees every day – or just about 10%.

That may not sound like a lot now. But it adds up to take away $365 in Bitcoin from you over the course of the year.

Features

• Offers more than 130 cryptocurrency assets to invest in
• Has a Coinbase debit card that lets you use crypto for everyday purchases
• Offers on-platform staking to earn free crypto automatically
• It has a highly-rated mobile app
• The platform features many educational resources to help new crypto investors learn.

Features like these are why Coinbase has developed such a large base of customers. The website is super straightforward to use and makes it easier for investors of all skill levels to take advantage of the upside of the cryptocurrency industry.

Do they offer a wallet?

Coinbase Wallet is one of the most popular self-custody crypto wallets on the market today. It’s similar to MetaMask in that users can transfer their cryptocurrency assets to the wallet so that they can use them across Web 3.0.

For example, you can add Ethereum to Coinbase Wallet and then use it on an application like Aave to borrow stablecoins against it.

The Coinbase Wallet is also one that you can use to store your NFTs. Just keep in mind that since this is a self-custody wallet, you alone are responsible for safeguarding the assets that you keep in it.

Mobile app

Coinbase’s mobile app is one of the most widely downloaded on both the Apple and Google Play stores. It has a total of more than 2 million downloads across both platforms.

The mobile app takes what you love about Coinbase and gives you an easy way to access it on the go. You can use the app to manage your portfolio, trade crypto, and do anything else that you would be able to do on the Coinbase website.

Coinbase Pro

Our review of Coinbase wouldn’t be complete without first mentioning Coinbase Pro. If you’re not familiar with Coinbase Pro, it’s essentially a more advanced version of the Coinbase trading platform.

The name “Pro” comes from the fact that this site was designed to be used by people who are already familiar with trading crypto. The site has lots of helpful tools for advanced traders but doesn’t have any of the informative features that the standard Coinbase website has to help new users.

The cool part about Coinbase Pro is that the fees on the platform are lower than they are on Coinbase. They range from 0.6% to 0.0%, depending on how much you’re investing on the platform.

The downside is that there’s no automatic purchase scheduling on Coinbase Pro. So you can dollar-cost average on the site, but you have to do it automatically.

All in, Coinbase Pro is an excellent alternative to Coinbase for experienced cryptocurrency investors who are looking for cheaper fees and don’t need the hand-holding that the main website offers. But you probably shouldn’t use Coinbase Pro if you’re not very familiar with crypto investing in general.

Compare Coinbase before you invest

Coinbase is one of the most widely-trusted and widely-used cryptocurrency platforms in existence. But that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s the right option for your crypto investing goals.

It’s important to compare Coinbase with some of your other options before you make a decision about which crypto platform to use. If you don’t do this, you could miss out on a platform with features that are perfect for the type of investing you want to do.

Or you might end up paying higher fees on Coinbase even though another platform could help you reach your goals at a lower cost per transaction.

The bottom line is that if you want to make sure that you’re using the best platform for your crypto investing goals, you need to compare Coinbase to your other options.

Thankfully, our platform makes it really easy to do that. You can use our simple comparison tool to get all of the insights you need to make a more informed decision about where to begin your crypto journey.