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Due to our past post about Cardano Price Predictions, we have a few people messaging us and asking us to help them buy Cardano in Europe. We understand that this might be the main concern of many interested buyers. There are a lot of people that aren’t buying Cardano from a safe exchange and they get scammed by people that steal all of their funds or get a much lower quantity of ADA than they should. The main purpose of this article is to educate the beginners and help them choose a respectable exchange to buy ADA.

Ways to buy Cardano (ADA) in Europe

There are many ways from which you can buy Cardano in Europe. We will create a list with all the best options here and analyze the potential outcome of every scenario.

Case #1 – Buying Cardano (ADA) from a friend – This is a great way for a beginner to get started. To get help from a more experienced friend. But, not all of us have that friend and also if you always count on others you won’t be able to do it alone. We don’t recommend this method for beginners as its important to learn the best practices by applying those – not to count on someone else to do it for you.

Case #2 – Buying Cardano (ADA) from a Cryptocurrency Exchange – This is actually a great way to get started. Buying Cardano from a cryptocurrency exchange will teach you the basics. You will learn how to create an account on a cryptocurrency exchange, how to fill out a KYC and how to create a market order to purchase ADA. We will talk more about this soon.

Case #3 – Buying Cardano (ADA) from a Cryptocurrency buying website – Not the best way to start with ADA. These types of websites purchase ADA from exchanges and sell it to you. They’re basically brokers that are gaining a fee that you pay. We will talk more about the disadvantages of purchasing ADA from a service soon.

Case #4 – Buying a cryptocurrency and exchanging it for Cardano (ADA)/ Already having a cryptocurrency and exchanging it for Cardano – Again, this is not a perfect scenario as you will lose a certain % of your investment from the exchange fees. Though, we need to keep this into consideration and analyze this too. If you however have a cryptocurrency and want to exchange it for Cardano – we’ll show you how soon.

Buying Cardano(ADA) from a cryptocurrency exchange or a cryptocurrency buying website – What you should know & which cryptocurrency exchange you should use

Firstly, every cryptocurrency exchange have a certain fee. Some of them have low ones that are under 1% and some of them pass the 2%. Its important to know this as you may ask why your portfolio lost 1% just after you bought the tokens even if the price stayed the same. And this is the answer. There are some exchanges that also have withdrawal fees – in case you want to keep your ADA in a more secure place such as a Trezor Wallet – which recently accepts Cardano (ADA) on its T Model. There are two well-known places in Europe that you can purchase ADA from:

Coinmama

Coinmama is one of the service website that lets you purchase cryptocurrency from it. It is not a cryptocurrency exchange, as you cannot sell cryptocurrencies using it – only buy. Formed in 2013 and active until 2018 – Coinmama operated in 188 countries worldwide and is also available in 24 US States. Coinmama offer investors a simple way to purchase: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Cardano, QTUM, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash and Ripple. To be able to purchase from Coinmama, you also need to verify your account by submitting a passport, national ID card or driver’s license card to its platform. This process usually takes less than one hour, in some times even less than 15 minutes – depending on how fast can you complete the steps.

Coinmama Fees

But Coinmama also have a big issue from an investor’s point of view – The Coinmama fees. The fees are way too high. To purchase from Coinmama with a credit card, you will be charged with a 5.00% processing fee. Also, they have a trading fee for 5.9%. This means that if you want to purchase 1,000 Euro worth of Cardano (ADA) from Coinmama, you will need a total of 1,105 Euro, plus another fee from your bank to exchange your currency to Euro- if you don’t already have it.

This means that only by purchasing Cardano (ADA) from Coinmama, you will already be at a ~11% loss. If you will purchase exactly 1,000 Euroworth of Cardano (ADA) – you will receive 14,194.31 ADA which at the current market price have a value of 946.76 Euro. And here the processing fee its ignored. If we add that, we reach a 890 Euro value of ADA. The good part of it is that they don’t have a withdrawal fee – as Coinmama will send you the Cardano (ADA) directly to your wallet address.

So, should you buy from Coinmama? We don’t believe so. There could be some places where you could get a better value and not lose ~11% of your hard earned money.

Kraken Cryptocurrency Exchange

Kraken Cryptocurrency Exchange is one of the most-known and oldest bitcoin exchange. As the time passed, Kraken added various cryptocurrencies – and also Cardano (ADA).Kraken is trusted by regulated banks from Europe, government officials from Japan and many others. They accept FIAT cryptocurrency deposits in EUR,USD, CAD and JPY and also a large list of cryptocurrencies. To be able to purchase any cryptocurrency from Kraken, you need to verify your account by complying to their KYC and AML requirements.

Best part about Kraken? You can deposit FIAT to purchase Cardano (ADA) by:

Wire transfer – Around 20-25 Euro. This fee is depends on your bank.
Bank Transfer( SEPA) – Free deposit, no fee except the one from your Bank. Mention: Only if you live in the SEPA zone.
Electronic Funds Transfer

Kraken Fees

To purchase Cardano (ADA) from Kraken, the fee for a Maker is 0.16% and for a Taker is 0.26%. More details about maker and faker fees in this article. There’s also a helping article about Kraken fees. The main point is, you will not lose more than 1% by purchasing Cardano (ADA) from Kraken. But Kraken does have a cryptocurrency withdrawal fee – that for Cardano (ADA) is 0.3 ADA. So, if you want to purchase 1,000 Euro worth of ADA from Kraken – you will be charged a 0.16% or 0.26% and a withdrawal fee of 0.3 ADA. Which means that with 1000 Euro you can purchase 15,043.74 ADA. This is almost 1,000 more ADA than you would get by using Coinmama.

The biggest issue is that Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange, which might look a bit unfriendly for a cryptocurrency beginner. I think the best thing is to check the following videos and learn how to use it:

There is also another option to buy Cardano (ADA) – which is Changelly. But, due to their fees – its not even worth mentioning. For 1000 Euro you could get only 12,676.65 ADA. Which in our opinion, a service like this shouldn’t exist in the cryptocurrency market. Almost 200 Euro are paid in fees for this service and we do not recommend you to use it, neither its competitor – Coinmama. These platform may be user-friendly, but the fees are too high and you’d lost a big part of your investment paying them.

Exchanging another cryptocurrency for Cardano (ADA) – Which platform to use?

Firstly, you need to check if you can exchange the cryptocurrency directly to ADA. Mostly of the cryptocurrencies that can be switched to ADA are ETH, BTC, BNB, USDT, TUSD and LTC. If not, then you need to switch your cryptocurrency to one of the ones mentioned above. Preferably, you can switch to ETH or BTC as these are the ones accepted by most of the exchanges and also have a low transfer fee. LTC would have been our first option if the volume would have been higher on the LTC/ADA pair – but unfortunately is not so we’ll stick with ETH and BTC.

Then, you need to choose a cryptocurrency platform to exchange your BTC or ETH to ADA. There are two cryptocurrency exchanges that we recommend: Bittrex and Binance. Bittrex have a fixed 0.25% trading fee with more than 140 cryptocurrencies listed there. They have been among the best in 2017 – but fall back as soon as Binance was launched.

Binance on the other hand have a very dynamic fee schedule. As soon as you start, your trading fees will be 0.1% – if you don’t own any BNB. If you chose to pay the fees with BNB ( Binance Coin), the feed would be only 0.075%. The fees can go as low as 0.015% for a maker or 0.03% for a taker – if you have a trade volume larger than 150,000 BTC per month and you hold more than 11,000 BNB ( ~$106,370 ).

We personally think that the best option for purchasing Cardano (ADA) with cryptocurrency would be Binance. Their low fees, top security and extremely helpful support makes it the perfect place to exchange your cryptocurrency for Cardano. A helpful tutorial about Buying Cardano from Binance was wrote by Usethebitcoin – you can check it here: How To Buy Cardano (ADA) From Binance

Of course, there are others exchanges that can be used.But, for the moment these ones are the ones that are perfect for what you need. Keep in mind that your funds shouldn’t stay on an exchange. If those funds are there, they can be hackable. Its important to keep them in a Trezor Model T, Daedalus Wallet or soon – on a Ledger Nano S.

Would Cardano (ADA) Increase in Value Again?

We’re not financial analysts. And neither them can predict the future with a perfect accuracy. ADA increased from $0.02 to $1.15 top value. A merely $100 investment in Cardano when it was listed on its first exchange would have brought an profit of $5,650. But this might never happen again. Since January, Cardano’s value drop to a minimum of $0.063 and its now sitting at $0.077 with a 10%+ increase since October 31st, 2018. Cardano might increase in value in the future weeks, as Coinbase will probably add Cardano to Coinbase Pro – making it available to 600,000 active traders. Ledger – the famous hardware wallet producer – plans to add Cardano until the end of 2018.

And there are more to come for Cardano. The Cardano roadmap was just updated recently. As the developments will continue, we think that Cardano will also increase in value. Probably it won’t reach a $1 very soon, but a $0.10 – $0.15 within a few months its possible. Remember to invest only as much as you can afford to lose, as Cardano decreased more than 90% since its all time high. A $5,750 investment in Cardano at its top value would now worth $385. Think thoroughly before buying.

Conclusion

We hope that this small guide was helpful and it showed you how to think when you’re buying Cardano (ADA). Don’t get fooled by services claiming to be the best way to purchase a certain cryptocurrency. Make your own research. At least that’s what we do and we saw the huge discrepancy between Coinmama and Kraken. There might be other services from where you can buy Cardano (ADA), but this are the ones that we found to be trustworthy.

Notes

Websites like Bitmex and eToro doesn’t allow you to buy Cardano (ADA) – Those are mainly used by cryptocurrency leverage traders.
Check the website 3-4 times before purchasing from it. Some people might create a website such as ‘kraken.co’ instead of ‘kraken.com’ to scam users. Be very careful when you’re buying.
If you plan to keep the funds on an exchange – not recommended, not your keys – not your funds – be sure to set up a 2FA by Google Authenticator.
Do not disclose your 2FA or your password to anyone, neither to employees of an exchange. They will never ask you for a password or 2FA.

Did we missed a great way to purchase ADA? Do you know a cheaper way to get it? Let us know by writing in the comments below.

Image source: Nationall