What is Changelly – Complete Review

Changelly is an exchange service for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its purpose is to act as a mediator between online traders and trading platforms, allowing for nearly instant exchanges for over 90 altcoins. First founded in 2013, Changelly has been operating well since 2015. The platform’s headquarters are located in Prague, Czech Republic.

Changelly’s first prototype was developed in 2013, originally as a startup project. The task was carried out by the MinerGate team, which was a mining pool for Bitcoin. Starting humbly, Changelly gradually started to grow bigger, eventually becoming an independent exchange service in 2014.

This meant that it got its own separate team, and a CEO by the name of Konstantin Gladych. After many years and significant advancements in technology, they officially released in 2015 as a fully operating cryptocurrency exchange system, where it has been growing ever since.

Understanding the team behind any project helps us get a bit of a better understanding of how it came about, why it matters and how the creators of the business crafted to have an unique meaning to a growing user base. The same holds true for Changelly, which fortunately has a favorable profile in its CEO.

Changelly’s CEO, Konstantin Gladych, has been part of a lot of other companies in the past with different positions before finally stepping up to take charge of Changelly as its CEO.

Before he started spearheading Changelly’s operations, most of Gladych’s positions were usually involved with product management for various entities.

Some of his places of work and positions were his experience as Product Project Management & Business Development at Segmento/RuTarget from January 2013 – December 2014; Head of Products for Clickky Family from January 2015 – June 2015; as Head of Mobile Marketing Team at Embria from July 2015 – March 2016, which finally led to him joining Changelly as its CEO in April 2016.

Gladych also holds a Ph.D in data mining and machine learning and with his skillset and credentials has been able to gradually yet certainly lead Changelly to be known amongst the cryptocurrency community.

Changelly Review: How Does Changelly Work, and How do You Buy?

Changelly is a cryptocurrency exchange system without following conventional exchange traditions or interface, which is why some of aspects of its system make it similar to other exchanges while other components of the Changelly system make it very different and unique.

A prime aspect of the Changelly design is how it seeks to minimize and eliminate the different technical drawbacks of the current exchange systems in existence.

Building upon this premise, the founders of Changelly have created Changelly with an automatic trading robot, which is also well integrated into many popular and revered trading platforms such as Poloniex or Bittrex.

What this robot does, is it goes on these trading platforms, and makes bids or asks, and uses this approach in order to find the best rates available on those sites. Of course, these are close estimate rates and they can be a little different, but they are usually fairly approximate.

The buying process through Changelly isn’t really any more complicated than if you were to buy coins from any other exchange. But of course, it’s a crypto to crypto exchange, meaning that you’ll need to make sure you already have some coins in your Changelly account before you can start exchanging.

Assuming you’ve got the coins you’d like to make an exchange with, you’ll log on to Changelly and pick out the coins you have that you’ll be exchanging, and then the coins that you’d like to exchange them with. For example, if you had Bitcoin and wanted Ethereum, you would go ahead and input how much Bitcoin you want to exchange.

The platform would automatically tell you how much Ethereum you will receive in exchange, if you are fine with the amount displayed by the platform, then you would proceed through the exchange process.

Furthermore, if you are looking to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Bitcoin Cash with credit card, then you may go ahead and do so from the exchange’s online interface as well.

Before you proceed, the exchange will greet you with a prompt.

You would choose your respective status and then proceed. If you are a new user, you would have to sign up and then continue with your transaction. If you are a new user, you would enter your account and password and move forward.

Next you’ll need to put in the address for the wallet that’s going to get the exchanged coins, and then you’ll see the estimated amount you’ll be spending to receive the other coins. When this is done, you’ll be given both a QR code, and an address for a wallet.

This is the wallet address you’ll need to send your coins to be exchanged for the ones you want. After Changelly can confirm they’ve received your coins, they’ll send back the amount you wanted in the other type of coin.

While there isn’t really a minimum or maximum you can exchange in cryptocurrencies here, there sort of is a minimum when it comes to having enough for the fees of the transaction. These fees are usually known as the network fees which get paid directly to each respective blockchain network.

However, when it comes to making credit card transactions on Changelly, not only will you have a minimum purchase limit of $50 and a maximum purchase limit of $20,000 including the relevant fee, you will also need to go through a verification process that usually involves sharing an image of your government issued ID with the procedure getting completed within hours in most cases.

Changelly Review: Fees

Changelly is still providing you with a service, so it’s expected that you’re going to have some fees, in some form or fashion, to use their said service.

The first fee is the “network fee” that you’ll need to be able to pay for when making your exchanges. The network fee is a fee that must be paid regardless of the exchange you use, since it is directly paid to the cryptocurrency network that you are using. The network fee varies based on the respective cryptocurrency network and the amount of demand that the network has in terms of transactions, along with the specific time that you want to execute your transaction.

The network fee is not all that relatively high, but if you’re exchanging a small amount, you’ll need to make sure you have enough for the fee as well.

In addition, users also have to be ready to pay a trading fee of 0.5% for each trade.

For a helpful look at the rates for certain coins, you can check out the chart located here.

The following chart lists the cryptocurrencies, the network fee for them, and the suggested amount to use in the transfer with these currencies.

Changelly Review: Is Changelly Safe to Use?

No matter which exchange you are using, as someone who is dealing in financial assets, it is understandable if your first and foremost concern gets to be the safety and security of your funds whether they be in fiat or cryptocurrencies.

This approach gets all the more imperative when you are using cryptocurrencies, since these highly secured assets often fall prey to thefts and malicious attacks.

Therefore, checking an exchange for its security and safety is imperative. After all, you don’t want to lose your funds due to a supposed lack of diligence.

So what kind of criteria can you use to make sure that an exchange is safe?

For starters, you can look at its history.

History

Changelly has been around for a relatively short time-frame and thus does not boast of an extensive historic footprint in terms of years of operation.

However, at the same time, three years in the cryptocurrency industry with a growing and flourishing presence does mean something. As the cryptocurrency industry is operating at a fast-moving space, one who lasts and operates per year adds to the credibility and professionalism of the exchange.

The years a business spends in the cryptocurrency industry are akin to dog years.

Changelly has endured and continues to stay in the world of cryptocurrency, meaning that it has been tested to a certain extend and has at least proved its mettle for the time that it has been around for.

The next step on this checklist is to determine if an exchange has been hacked in the past in any form or fashion.

Hacks

We’ve scoured the web and haven’t found any prominent instances, or really any instances, where funds were stolen directly from Changelly. This means that it checks out on this very important front.

Furthermore, since Changelly does not store users’ funds and sends exchanged funds directly to their wallets within minutes, it also does not hold any cryptocurrencies for its users except for the minutes during a trade. This way, users do not have to worry if their funds are kept safe within Changelly’s own wallets or not.

After this, we can look at how the exchange is seen within the community or rather, how it is accepted for its services.

Integrations

One of Changelly’s unique selling points is its acceptance, as it works by being integrated into various exchanges.

Already being integrated into other exchange services advocates that Changelly is a legitimate exchange, since other exchanges wouldn’t use Changelly’s added services if they weren’t to be trusted.

Bear in mind: just like you, businesses don’t want to get scammed either.

Additional Features

Since there’s no deposit storage and the transactions are almost instantaneous at Changelly, you don’t need to wait and wonder for long when you’re actually going to get your new currency.

All the accounts are also protected with a 2-Factor authentication mechanism. This means that you’ll need another device with the Google Authenticator installed on it to verify and process transactions.

This for your own safety and for the exchange as well. The more security measures that an exchange has in place to protect you translates to the length it can go to protect its users and keep their financial assets safe.

Userbase

Despite the fact that Changelly is still a fairly new exchange site, they have had over 500,000 satisfied customers, and they have well over 3 million users that attend and use their site on a regular basis.

Customer Service

Having this many users engage with Changelly isn’t a small feat, and they’ve been known to have some pretty decent customer service too. User aort2 from reddit has made a statement that after accidentally sending over $3,000 worth in cryptocurrency to Changelly, their customer service support was helpful in returning all the coins within just a couple of days.

Still, with all exchanges you’re always putting yourself at a little bit of risk. You’re sending away money, trusting another party to give you the exchanged currency back soon, but Changelly has done fairly well even though they’re still quite new.

Changelly Review: Is Changelly a Good Exchange Platform for Primary use?

While Changelly has a lot to offer, and a lot of nice features, it also still has its downsides that don’t make it so great either. So what are the good and bad things about using Changelly for normal use?

One thing that Changelly is really great at, is finding some of the best rates for exchanges that are available on the market. It can be difficult to search for a rate that works for you, and as always, we all want the best possible rates.

In addition to helping you find good rates, Changelly’s way of dealing out fees can be a lot more fair to some people. While both Changelly and other exchange platforms have fees for both parties, Changelly levies a flat fee for both parties.

There is no party that gets a cheaper fee than the other. Instead, they both pay the same fee, it doesn’t matter which side they’re on.

However, when Changelly’s fee of 0.5% in addition to the network fee is compared with exchanges such as Binance that operates on a trading fee of 0.1% (0.05% if you use its BNB token to pay trading fee); the quick service exchange leaves a lot to be desired for those who do not want to spend a large chunk of money over exchange trading fees.

At the same time, the higher fee is justified by Changelly’s anonymous services, as all that the exchange requires is a user’s wallet address to complete a trade.

Changelly is also considered to actually be a pretty secure platform compared to a lot of other exchanges at the same level. When Changelly was tested for its security through Mozilla’s Observatory, they uncovered an interesting insight.

The security at Changelly was actually above the average security for many exchange sites.

Changelly scored a B, (we know, it’s not an A), but many others score much lower. With the use of 2-factor authentication, and ID requirements sometimes, the platform is very secure.

At times, one may think that all these precautions might be little too tedious for simple process of conducting an exchange, but it keeps you safe, and helps prevent scammers from trying to steal your coins.

Changelly even has plenty of supported cryptocurrencies, and with so many regular customers, it’s still a very active community. Not only is Changelly still a pretty safe exchange, but it’s been gaining in popularity since it’s official debut in 2015.

While Changelly may not be the exchange for everyone, it isn’t a bad choice either. Being a safe, secure platform, with a growing number of customers and transparent fees, Changelly can be a good choice for almost any individual.

The only hurdle for those that are new to the world of cryptocurrency is that they have to have prior knowledge.

They have to know that they need a wallet or an address to send their coins to, they have to know that they have cryptocurrency to start trading and then they have to understand why they want one coin over the other.

Changelly’s Affiliate Program

Something you might not have known, or even thought you’d see with Changelly, is that they also have an affiliate program. Changelly’s affiliate program gives you a “50% revenue share, forever.”

Like most affiliate processes, it’s fairly simple. Changelly will provide you with a special link (or the use of a widget.) connected to your user ID. This link can be shared with other people you know, and/or placed on a personal website that you have and use.

When other people use this link to make exchanges, you’ll then receive a bonus in revenue, which is 50%.

You can do things like customize your link, and select the currency pairs that you use for your exchanges. To spread the link more, you can share it through social media, or blogs, or any other websites you use.

If you’re someone who’s going to be dealing with cryptocurrencies a lot, and surround yourself in communities that also deal with cryptocurrencies quite a bit, this could program be a great benefit for you as well.

Should I Use Changelly?

Changelly has a lot of nice features, and bonuses for users. They’re great at having a secure platform, especially compared to several other exchange sites.

Changelly has a growing popularity and user base, making it great for new connections, and a wide variety of users to exchange with. Their fees make it fair and simple for all parties during the exchange, and if you can afford the rate of 0.5% per trade in the name of ease of use, then it does not leave much to be argued.

They even have a nice affiliate program for users to get involved with, so Changelly has a lot of pluses.

Changelly won’t work out for everyone, but consider what things you need out of an exchange service.

Maybe you love the way their fees work, but it may also be possible that you don’t like the fact that exchange is still a fairly new company.

Whether the idea that the site is growing and would provide better service makes it enticing or their different security methods and straightforward exchange transaction process makes you fan.

Whatever the case may be, it’s important to think about just what it is that you’re looking for from an exchange service, and after laying out your criteria, decide if Changelly can be the one to meet your needs in the best way possible.

Changelly Rating: 4.0 - Review by