Coinexchange.io Review

Update – Jan 20th, 2019

Coinexchange support finally got back to me, informing me that they would re-process the withdrawal I had made that was “lost in cyberspace” with a TX ID of 1.

It’s good to see some support finally come through, although it is absolutely unacceptable that support should take that long to receive.

If anyone from coinexchange.io is reading this, please consider hiring more staff to take care of your support needs!

Original Review

Something I’ve been reviewing more of recently is product and services related to cryptocurrency. In particular, I’m starting to “find my flow” when it comes to reviewing cryptocurrency exchanges.

The exchange is where you buy and sell cryptocurrency. It’s like a big marketplace for crypto, and there are loads of exchanges all around the Internet. For example, I recently did a review of Cryptopia – one of the larger exchanges. I’m also planning on doing reviews on other ones like Binance, Poloniex, TradeSatoshi and more.

Today I’ll be doing a review of coinexchange.io and trying to see whether it is good or if it is a “scam exchange”.

My Opinion Of Coinexchange.Io

There are some positives about coinexchange. Their interface isn’t terrible, and there are definitely opportunities to profit on this exchange due to the proliferation of low market cap coins – you wouldn’t want to hold (or should i say HODL) them, but if you are shrewd enough you can do really well putting say $500 into one of these coins, riding it up on a pump, and then getting out with a nice profit. Of course you can also get massively burned as well!

The fundamental issue with coinexchange.io is that it is plagued by the same issues that tend to ruin all other cryptocurrency exchanges:

1. There are numerous bugs. Some of them are serious like the wallet withdrawal issue. Sometimes when you withdraw, you set the correct withdrawal address, confirm the transaction and then wait for it to go from “pending” to “complete”. And then when it goes to complete the transaction ID on coinexchange shows as a single number, usually “1”. This is, of course, not just a display bug. Your transaction legitimately doesn’t exist, and your withdrawal never shows up. I’ve personally fallen victim to the “TX ID = 1” issue on coinexchange.io, and have seen on the Bitcointalk forum and in Discord channels for coins I hold that many, many others have had the same issue. The only way to fix this is to contact support. This leads me on to my next point:
2. The support is atrocious. Every single exchange I have used has bad support. But coinexchange takes it to the next level in terms of “crapness”. Why? Because the support ticket system doesn’t even work properly. First of all, you seemingly have to register a separate support account because they use a 3rd party ticket platform. This is annoying and time wasting. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be lucky to actually get functional support. I’ve tried submitting about 1/2 dozen support requests for a withdrawal error, using different browsers, OS, devices etc. Every time I complete the ticket form I hit a Freshdesk 404 page. However, I then receive an email from coinexchange claiming that my ticket has been received, and that I can check its status by following the enclosed link. Naturally, I follow the enclosed link and I don’t have any support tickets open – my plea for help (and my money) is lost in the ether. Good luck trying to find an email address for support either, because there isn’t one. I’ve even checked their Whois domain registration info and that’s hidden with privacy settings. I’ve also tried getting support on their Twitter and had no luck either. And all that being said, even if you do successfully get a support ticket through, many others on Bitcointalk report days, weeks (and some even now months) with no meaningful response, or no resolution to their issue. Fun times, right?
3. There are issues with low price, low volume, low marketcap coins and price discrepancies between pairings (NB there is probably a technical way to explain this – please comment if you can). Probably the best example of this is Stronghands, SHND. The bulk of the trading activity happens between the SHND and DOGE pairing. At the time of writing 1 SHND purchased on the SHND/DOGE market = $0.000005. That is less than 1 satoshi (the smallest unit of Bitcoin) which is currently $0.0001365856. The problem here is that coinexchange.io also offers a SHND/BTC pairing. And because the smallest unit you can buy using bitcoin is 1 satoshi, if you buy SHND on the BTC pairing you wind up paying a whole lot more than you should for each unit of SHND. There is an enormous “sell wall” of 1 sat Stronghands on coinexchange, so it’s not like you can just go arbitrage and buy $1000 on the DOGE pairing and sell it immediately for 27-odd times the money on the BTC pairing. HOWEVER, newbies are routinely getting caught out by this as evidenced by the fact that there is still some volume every day for Stronghands alone on the SHND/BTC pairing. If you’re new to cryptocurrency it can be very easy to transfer some BTC to coinexchange (with the intention of buying SHND), see that there is a direct BTC pairing, not check the values correctly and then wind up with a small, totally over-priced stash of crypto that you will likely never see a profit from. This happened on a larger scale around 13th Jan 2019, when CoinMarketCap stopped reporting the “true” value of SHND by dropping the DOGE pairing and only showing the BTC pairing value – that 1 sat minimum. This temporarily sent the price of SHND on CoinMarketCap surging by around 3000% (right to the top of the gainers and losers chart). Because crypto traders – especially newbies – have an uncanny ability to decide to buy in only after massive, unnatural and unsustainable price rises, you can guess what happened next – people flocked to coinexchange.io to buy SHND with BTC (because they didn’t check the DOGE market first) and thus a new generation of miserable bag holders was born, not to mention the reputation damage to Stronghands as well.

Is coinexchange.io a scam? Probably not. It’s not as glaring bad as say coinsmarkets.com (which almost certainly has turned out to be a scam). The withdrawal issue is probably just a bug as it can be fixed by support when you eventually reach them. However, due to the unregulated, rapidly-changing nature of the cryptocurrency world you need to be careful. For example, uring my use of the site it has gone down a couple of times for unscheduled maintenance. And that could easily turn in to permanent maintenance and the site owner(s) running off to the Seychelles with your Bitcoin in tow. I suspect it’s just an amateur-run outfit that has been developed on a shoestring budget.

Fundamentally, I think you should avoid coinexchange.io like you would tertiary syphilis or Ebola – that is to say run a million miles in the opposite direction. It’s buggy. there are known issues with withdrawing, and you have no way of knowing the financial or even infrastructural backing of the platform. However, in the crazy world that is cryptocurency you have to accept that sometimes you can find diamonds under piles of dog turd. Coinexchange.io is a great example of this. It’s basically horrendous to use but if you can tolerate it (including the risk of not getting your withdrawals) then you can potentially do okay if you feel the need to dabble in the dark side of truly garbage cryptos.

What I would say is that you should avoid using this exchange for any crypto where there is a better, more trustworthy alternative. For example, you can swap BTC for Dogecoin on Bittrex, Poloniex, or Cryptopia – these are all far more trustworthy exchanges. You should only use “fringe” exchanges like coinexchange.io for buying something you basically cannot get anywhere else (a good example would be something like Stronghands. I used coinexchange for this precise coin as I liked the idea of getting millions of something for less than a hundred bucks … it’s just a good laugh really). As always never leave anything on the exchange you aren’t willing to lose, and make withdrawals immediately – bearing in mind that with coinexchange your withdrawal might never show up at all!

If you do want to register for this exchange, then you can do so here. I could provide you with my affiliate link (so that I earn a cut on the trade fees you make for the exchange) but I think with the issues I’ve had that would be immoral to do so. If I get my withdrawal sorted and the support picks up a bit, then I might change my mind. That being said, if you’d like to thank me then you can always send me a tip in the cryptocurrency of your choosing  – just comment below and I’ll leave you my address 😉

Also, if you’re new to cryptocurrency investing and want to get a concise and effective “quick start” guide that will help you avoid common mistakes, then I recommend this book – Cryptocurrency Investing Bible. It’s available on Amazon for less than the price of a cup of coffee (for the Kindle edition). It’s well worth checking out to get a sound grounding in key crypto investing concepts. Click here to check out the book.