Coinjar is an Australian cryptocurrency exchange operating in Australia and the United Kingdom that allows you to buy and sell a range of different cryptocurrencies. The platform supports fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, for residents of Australia and the UK.

What is Coinjar?

Coinjar is a cryptocurrency exchangethat allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.

The platform lists – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and Zcash and a couple of Ethereum tokens such as DAI, ZRX and BAT.

Users in the UK and Australia can use Coinjar to deposit fiat money (AUD, GBP) using their bank account and purchase cryptocurrency in a very convenient way. In the UK Coinjar supports the Faster Payments scheme which means that users' bank deposits get processed within minutes and they can start trading almost immediately after sign-up. In Australia, users can use multiple payment methods such as cash deposits and bank transfers to deposit AUD into their Coinjar account.

For those based outside of Australia or the UK, you can sign-up for Coinjar but not deposit money by bank transfer. You would have to deposit funds via cryptocurrency, which is not an option if you are new to crypto and don’t own any.

In the future, the team at Coinjar are planning to expand their offering to other countries, however at the time of writing there is no clear indication when this will be.

On top of its beginner friendly exchange platform, Coinjar also offers ‘Coinjar Swipe’, a debit card that allows you to seamlessly convert your crypto into AUD and spend it at any Australian EFTPOS terminal on the fly.

How does Coinjar work?

Coinjar works similarly to other cryptocurrency exchanges. First, you’ll need to sign-up for an account by submitting your details and confirming your email address.

Next, if you’re from Australia or the UK and want to have the option of funding your Coinjar account via your local bank account, you’ll need to verify your identity by uploading ID documents. Without verifying your account, you’ll need to deposit funds with a cryptocurrency.

Once your account is verified and funded, you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Verifying your account also makes you eligible for the ‘Coinjar Swipe’ debit card.

Once you’ve bought your desired cryptocurrency, you can keep it in your hosted Coinjar wallet, or withdraw them to a non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet of your choosing.

On top of the conventional fiat-to-crypto services, you can also swap crypto-to-crypto pairs on the Coinjar platform. This comes in handy if you bought Ether (ETH) but want to buy DAI tokens. Coinjar allows you to exchange the two directly without having to sell for fiat first.

In case you’re wondering, Coinjar makes their money by levyying a small transaction fee every time you trade.

One last thing worth mentioning is that Coinjar only offers so-called spot-trading. This means that you can only buy crypto at market prices, effectively entering a long position (your investment value goes up if crypto prices go up). You can’t speculate on the crypto market going down in value. If this is something that you want to do, then you’ll need to use a platform offering margin trading or other leveraged products.

What cryptocurrencies does Coinjar support?

Coinjar only supports a total of five cryptocurrencies and four crypto tokens. This positions Coinjar somewhere in the middle in terms of number of supported crypto assets. Although there are thousands more, it’s important for exchanges to keep the quality of supported tokens high.

Cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin (BTC)
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Litecoin (LTC)
• ZCash (ZEC)
• Ripple (XRP)

Crypto Tokens:

• DAI: Dollar stablecoin
• USDC: Dollar stablecoin
• ZRX: Utility token powering the 0x decentralized exchange
• BAT: Utility token issued by Brave, the company behind the Brave privacy browser

Coinjar is continuously adding new Ethereum based tokens to the platform as this is where most innovation in the crypto space is currently happening.

Coinjar Fees

When using a cryptocurrency exchange there are a number of fees that you need to take into account. Most exchanges charge fees for depositing fiat currency by bank transfer or debit card as well as for withdrawing fiat currency. These fees are not actually meant to generate profits but rather to cover costs as exchanges need to pay fees to bank partners in order to process these payments.

Where exchanges do generate fees is when you trade fiat-to-crypto or crypto-to-crypto.

Lastly, exchanges charge a fee when you withdraw cryptocurrency to an external crypto wallet to cover the network costs going to miners for processing these transactions.

We’ve broken the main fees down below.

Coinjar Deposit Fees

• Crypto deposits: Free
• BPAY (Australian): Free
• Blueshyft cash deposit (Australian): 1.5%
• Faster Payments (UK): Free

Coinjar Withdrawal fees

• Australian bank account: Free
• UK Bank Account: Free
• Coinjar Swipe (Debit card): Free
• BPAY Biller: 0.5%
• External crypto address: No charge other than mining fees

In short, bank transfers are always the cheapest option to deposit and withdraw but they often take a bit more time to process, which can be a thorn in the eye if you want to start trading immediately. That’s where Blueshyft cash deposits come in handy, by allowing you to deposit cash in a range of supported locations and get AUD deposited to your Coinjar account almost instantly.

Trading fees

Coinjar has a rather straightforward fee system when it comes to trading. Essentially, every time you buy or sell a cryptocurrency on the platform, you’ll be charged a flat fee of 1%.

For example, if you bought $100 worth of cryptocurrency on Coinjar, you would pay a $1 fee. If you then sold the investment at the same price, you would again need to pay another $1. This is rather expensive as most exchanges charge somewhere between 0.25% to 0.50% per trade, which is why Coinjar is more interesting for retail investors who want to buy cryptocurrency occasionally as a long term investment, rather than professional day traders who buy and sell multiple times a day. For retail investors the fee is reasonable and the price you pay for a platform that is easy to use.

Coinjar Debit Card

The Coinjar debit card is available to Australian residents only. You might find the card interesting if you want to seamlessly move your money between crypto and Australian dollars without having to wait 1-2 for a bank transfer withdrawal. Another perk of the card is that you don’t pay the usual 1% trading fee when converting cryptocurrency into AUD.

Much like your ‘Everyday Bitcoin’ and ‘Cash Account’ within your CoinJar, once you sign up to CoinJar Swipe, you'll also have a ‘Swipe Account’ in the Account Overview. If you want to spend using your Coinjar card you’ll first need to transfer funds into this account, which as we mentioned is free of charge. The transfers are pretty much instant and you’ll be able to start spending with your Coinjar card pretty much instantly.

The card is free to order for Coinjar users but you’ll have to pay a $29 fee when ordering a new card. ATM withdrawals fees vary from one ATM to another but they’ll always be displayed before you finalize the transaction.

How to use Coinjar

As Coinjar is targeted towards users who are new to crypto the platform is extremely easy to use from sign-up to trading every feature is straightforward to use. For this end, Coinjar has implemented a pleasant design that is simplistic and encouraging. The buying and selling on Coinjar is made really simple. As you can see from the screenshot below, once you’ve chosen the cryptocurrency that you want to buy, all you need to do is enter the USD (or local currency) amount. The amount box then updates with the amount of cryptocurrency you will receive. Once you click “Review and confirm” and confirm the trade, you will receive the bitcoin transferred to what Coinjar calls your ‘Everyday Bitcoin account’. In terms of support, Coinjar offers a highly informative help section in which you’ll find literally all your questions answered. In case you have questions the Coinjar support team is quick to respond.

How to Sign-Up for Coinjar

If you’re based in Australia or the UK and want to purchase crypto using local currency you will need to sign-up and verify your account.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

Step 1: Open an Account

Head to Coinjar's website and click on “Sign-up” then fill out the email and password form.

Step 2: Confirm Email address

Before you can proceed to the next stage of the account set-up process, you’ll first need to verify your email address.

Once you’ve clicked on the link found within the email that Coinjar sends you, you need to sign in with the account credentials you chose in Step 1. In case you don’t receive the email from Coinjar make sure to check your spam folder.

Step 3: Choose a username, country of residence and enter phone number

Next, you need to choose a username for your newly created Coinjar account. Optionally, you can also decide to upload a profile picture.

You will also need to select your country of residence so that the Coinjar platform is customized for your specific location. This will give you access to bank deposits for example, if you’re a resident of the UK or Australia whereas other countries wouldn’t see those options.

After, you need to submit your phone number. It’s important that you enter your number correctly, as some Coinjar features will require you to confirm a code that is sent by SMS to your phone. If you decide to set-up two-factor authentication to protect your account, you’ll equally need this requirement.

Step 5: Link your Bank Account to Coinjar

To add funds to your Coinjar account in order to buy cryptocurrency, you’ll first need to link your bank account to the platform. Head to the ‘Settings’ tab and scroll down until you see the box that says ‘Link Bank Account’. Here you’ll need to enter the relevant account details. Note, it’s important that this account is under your name!

To verify that the account is truly yours, Coinjar will transfer two small bank deposits to your Bank account and ask you to enter the amount of these transfers into the Coinjar interface.

Step 6: Add funds to Coinjar by Bank Deposit

Once your bank account has been linked go to the ‘Accounts’ section and choose ‘Cash Account’. The Cash Account represents your fiat currency (AUD, GBP) inside Coinjar and you need to add funds to it in order to trade. Hit the ‘Make a Deposit’ option and you’ll be presented with multiple options to add funds. Below you can see the options available to Australian residents. PayID is a new real-time payment scheme in Australia which allows you to transfer funds almost instantly to Coinjar. However, not all Australian banks support it yet, so you might want to check if your bank is part of it. If your bank is not part of it you can either do a normal bank transfer or use the Cash deposit option.

Step 7: How to view your Coinjar Blockchain address

If you live outside of the UK and Australia and want to fund your Coinjar account with Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies you’ll need to find your Coinjar wallet address, which is like the crypto equivalent of a bank account number. Go to ‘Accounts’ and choose the cryptocurrency that you want to deposit. If you want to transfer Bitcoin for instance, choose ‘Everyday Bitcoin’ and click on ‘View address’. This will display a QR-code which you can scan with a mobile bitcoin wallet and send funds to it. If you have a desktop wallet you’ll need to copy paste the address. It is important that you only deposit the specific cryptocurrency that the wallet supports. For example, if you try to deposit Ethereum into your Bitcoin wallet address, the funds will be lost forever.

Once you’ve transferred your coins over to Coinjar, your account should be credited within about 10 to 30 minutes.

Is Coinjar a Wallet?

Coinjar is a custodial wallet and crypto exchange in one. The fact that it’s custodial means that you’re not in control of your funds. You don’t own the private key to move the funds on the Blockchain. Instead Coinjar stores those funds for you pretty much like a bank.

If you want to take ownership of your funds you need a non-custodial wallet.

The Coinjar wallet can store the five cryptocurrencies, which include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and Zcash as well as multiple tokens.

You can send these cryptocurrencies to any Blockchain address in the world using the Coinjar wallet or to other Coinjar users. Transfer to other Coinjar users is free of charge since they don’t involve an actual transfer of funds on the Blockchain but just an internal update of Coinjar’s ledger.

Does Coinjar have an app?

Coinjar also offers a mobile app to its users. You can download the app via your Android or iPhone device, free of charge. The app allows you to perform most of the actions that the web version supports as well as allowing you to check your funds on the go.

The app is especially useful if you use the Coinjar debit card and you want to quickly transfer funds from your Cash or Crypto Account to the ‘Coinjar Swipe Account’.

Is Coinjar Safe?

Coinjar supports a number of security measures to make your funds safe. When you store your funds in a custodial wallet like Coinjar there are two possible ways your funds can get stolen.

The first is that Coinjar itself gets hacked. Since they store your crypto funds in their own wallet on your behalf, if the wallet would get hacked you could potentially lose your funds.

To minimize this risk Coinjar stores 90% of users funds in so-called ‘cold wallets’ which are wallets that are not connected to the internet, which makes them virtually impossible to hack for remote hackers. The 10% of funds that are in online wallets are protected by a technology called ‘multi-sig’ which means that before funds can leave the wallet, the transactions needs to be approved by multiple co-signers.

The other danger is that someone gets access to your Coinjar account, impersonates you and instructs Coinjar to transfer funds to their account without your knowledge. This could happen if they get access to your phone or computer or your email and password.

To prevent this from happening it helps if you set-up two-factor-authentication. Two-factor-authentication means that when you make important transactions you need to enter a one-time code that is sent to your phone. If someone would get access to your email and password they could log-in but not transfer any funds since that would require access to your phone as well.

To protect your phone it’s important you set-up biometric security like Face-ID or Touch-ID both to unlock your phone as well as the Coinjar app.

Conclusion

Coinjar is an excellent choice for users who are new to crypto and want a platform that’s easy to use, offers good support and is secure. Moreover, it puts a lot of emphasis on offering multiple fiat deposit methods like cash deposits or real-time bank transfers which sets temp apart from many other exchanges which either don’t offer fiat deposits at all or normal ‘slow’ bank transfer.

The cryptocurrencies it supports are more than enough for beginners since they are the most dominant ones in terms of market capitalization. We also like that they support two dollar stablecoins which makes Coinjar interesting for remittances to other countries.