Coinmate

CoinMate makes it simple to start trading Bitcoin, and opening an account takes just a few minutes. The trading pair is BTC/EUR, and a deposit can be made using a variety of methods. These include SEPA, SOFORT and OKPay, along with a number of fee-free options (MoneyPolo, Bitcoin). MoneyPolo customers can deposit or withdraw bitcoin to cash in 90 countries around the world.

Orders can be made with one click at a guaranteed price thanks to a quick buy and sell feature. CoinMate operates the maker/taker trading model, whereby orders that supply liquidity to the market ('makers') get more favourable fees than those which lower the liquidity of the market ('takers').

Withdrawals can be made using the same methods as deposits. All transactions benefit from trading industry best practice security procedures, including email or Google Authenticator 2FA.

Other than encouraging market liquidity through their adoption of the maker/taker model, CoinMate offer an affiliate program to encourage growth. Users receive 50% of the collected trading fees of anyone they refer to CoinMate for six months from the date of first registration.

In addition, the top ten highest traders by volume each month are rewarded with 30 days of the lowest possible trading fees.

Trading: Maker Fee – 0.05%, Taker Fee – 0.35%

Deposit and Withdrawal:

CoinMate.io was founded in 2014. The company is registered in the UK, but based in the Czech Republic. The founders are both graduates of the University of Economics in Prague, and everyone involved with the project are early Bitcoin adopters.

What inspired you to start CoinMate.io, and what hurdles have you had to overcome thus far? What has the general reaction been?

We have been studying and trading Bitcoin since 2011. We attended major Bitcoin conferences in San Jose and London in 2013, around the time we started our first project - BitcoinPay.com (a Bitcoin payment & invoicing gateway) which won second place in Starcube - the Czech Startup Accelerator. When mtgox crashed, we decided to build our own Bitcoin exchange market, so  not be reliant on 3rd parties with cash flow. The architecture and the security of CoinMate had to be perfect, so we hired an IT development company experienced in banking to help us.

There are many companies in the Bitcoin trading space at the moment. What do you think CoinMate brings to give it a unique appeal?

Yes, there are many companies in the Bitcoin trading space at the moment, and the competition is tough. But my estimate is that as of today still about 80% of Bitcoin activity is in speculation and the huge potential of Bitcoin as a transaction mechanism remains unfulfilled. That's what we want to focus on.

One of our inventions in CoinMate is a Quick Buy and Sell method that guarantees the amount of Bitcoins you will get when buying or the amount of Euros you will get when selling Bitcoin at the market price. In our customers account statements, Quick Buy and Quick Sell trades show as one transaction, which is much more convenient for accounting as you don't have to calculate the final amount and average price from tens or hundreds of trades, from which the purchase or sale normally consists. Our exchange spread is below 0.5% because trades are settled directly from the order book. Of course you can trade on limit orders to speculate on price like on all of the other markets and we have the Maker/Taker fee model favoring traders that supply liquidity into the order book.

Just recently we have introduced Sofort bank transfers. This allows you to make instant bank deposits from online banking services of compatible banks across  11 European countries. Clients can deposit and withdraw funds instantly through OKPay and MoneyPolo. MoneyPolo customers can make deposits and withdrawals in cash, among other payment methods. We also plan on introducing an automated verification process that will allow new clients to buy Bitcoin in just 10 minutes from the time they complete their account registration. Speed is important to our clients, and we’re doing everything we can to reduce friction in bitcoin trading.

Describe CoinMate.io in six months time? In five years time?

We recently acquired two Bitcoin-ATM operators that plan to use CoinMate for their settlements. We are negotiating with a startup that is developing an app for money remittances using bitcoin as a transfer mechanism in the background. And we are in talks with a bank about a potential integration. Of course with BitcoinPay acquiring new merchants, more transactions will be settled on CoinMate.

If we succeed to integrate with more businesses over time, there will be room for speculators to run their bots on CoinMate. We already have some 3rd party auto-trading bots running on CoinMate, some of them use the timmolter XChange Java library.

This is where I see CoinMate in six months time. In 5-years time I definitely see the role of Bitcoin in Internet payments and maybe POS payments. And I see the potential of Bitcoin in international remittances, which has a model that's ripe for disruption. The role of CoinMate should be to provide technological background for such businesses and the opportunity for short and longterm trading. and longterm investment in Bitcoin as a side-product.