Author: Harry Napier
HitBTC – Crypto Broker Reviews
HitBTC is a fairly popular crypto exchange broker. They have been active since 2013, and now you can expect up to 10.000 users trading on this platform at any given moment. All this info can be found on their own website, it’s surprisingly transparent. Most brokerage providers simply throw numbers like ‘3 million users’ at you and leave you guessing if you can trust them.
On HitBTC, you can contact other people, ask them about their experience. There’s even a live chat called ‘trollbox’ where any signed user can throw a piece of their opinion. A live chatty user base also converts into regular fresh reviews on the aggregators like trustpilot.com and others.
What exactly is HitBTC?
This platform is an ‘advanced’ crypto exchange. HitBTC can let you exchange your currency, trade it, and so on. A large portion of the website is claimed by the vast spreadsheets containing all the market information you may need. This extensiveness is also reinforced by a sheer number of available currencies. There are 9 at the moment – Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Litecoin, Tron is just a handful of them.
HitBTC has free key values represented on promotional pages:
- Reliability;
- Security;
- Performance
The ‘security’ value is cared about the most here. In order to access your account, you need to undergo a 2FA (two-factor authentication), for that you need both your 2FA key and the password. And it works perfectly well, it seems.
As for the rest of these values, the reviews will tell how good HitBTC are at providing reliable and effective services.
The reviews in 2020
It seems that a lot of users have a nice time trading with HitBTC, but there’s also a thick layer of people who received an absolutely dismal experience. This exchange’s rating on trustpilot.com is 3.9/5 as of September 2020. Alone, this number is pretty good.
But you should definitely take into account that:
- only 49% of reviews are ‘excellent’ (which tells of a flawless experience)
- 27% are ‘bad’ (which tells of a terrible experience)
The results, therefore, are fairly polarized. Let’s see why it might come to be this way.
What’s wrong with HitBTC?
As mentioned, most of the reviews are positive. They praise the platform for its great support team (a lot of people seem to lose their two-factor authentication keys and then quickly have them back due to staff’s efforts) or how extensive the services are.
There are bad sides, too:
HitBTC takes a lot of time to withdraw money. It seems to be a reoccurring issue, and it comes in two ways. The website either takes a lot of time to withdraw the money you earned through trade, or they can simply block your funds for some reason.
The former is a more common theme on the review websites. The transfers you make can take a lot of time traveling from the website to your wallet. There are multiple reasons for that. Mostly, it has something to do with the user. The staff takes a lot of time to make sure it’s a real legal transfer, and they seem to do it with the majority of transfer, causing jams.
As for the latter issue, the blocking of the funds, it deserves its own subparagraph.
The company forces you to verify yourself. The platform can freeze your funds at any given moment, be that during transfer or when they simply lie blissfully on your balance sheet. The reason is often the same – the users need to verify themselves, provide certain papers to let staff know they’re dealing with the real person.
It wouldn’t be as obnoxious if they didn’t state time and time again that they don’t force KYC (know your customers) policies onto their users. But that’s exactly what they do – they force you to disclose personal information, submit papers, and then wait until they decide to unblock your funds (which can take a while).
This measure of security isn’t mentioned anywhere properly, and the results of it often include the loss of funds. This forces a lot of people to call HitBTC frauds, which they may be.
The withdraw fees are terribly high. The size of the fees is subjective, but this complaint is just too common. The fees you have to pay to withdraw your profits are too high. For instance, the flat withdraw fee for the ETH transfers seem to be 0.0428 ETH, which comes into a stark contrast with the progressive fee rate for trading that rises parallel to the amount of currency you need to trade.
It’s a strange decision, but it only gets stranger when you realize they don’t ever mention the withdraw fees before you sign up. There is a perfectly visible trade fees page in the bottom of the front page of the website, but not a word about the withdraw rates.
The positive reviews
There is also an ongoing streak of positive reviews. Most of them don’t specifically tell what’s so great about this crypto exchange, but some give you a clearer picture.
People praise the tech support. Despite the forced KYC policies and scam accusations, the support team is still fairly popular among the HitBTC users. The staff is competent when it comes to helping users out with the lost 2FA keys, or to giving advice.
HitBTC prides itself on the speed and effectiveness of its employees. The main page of the website even has a little plaque saying that ‘the support team is with you 24 hours a day’ and that ‘they will assist you with any issue or question’. And it looks like the support team fits the image well.
Conclusion
As a crypto exchange, HitBTC is an effective platform. However, as a platform to make profit from exchanging cryptocurrency, it’s flawed. HitBTC is probably not a scam in the full meaning of this word, but it’s definitely not the most transparent website. They hold back the crucial information and have a duplicitous attitude towards the well-being of their users.
All in all, using HitBTC as a full-time crypto exchange is risky, you probably shouldn’t invest too much here, because it’s really impossible to know when they freeze your funds for know reason.
