Where to buy crypto, and what each venue really costs

The five venue types

"Where should I buy crypto" gets answered badly because most comparisons treat every venue as a variation on the same product with a different fee attached. They are not. An exchange order book, a payment app, a peer-to-peer escrow marketplace and a machine in a petrol station are four different businesses with four different risk profiles, and the fee is often the least interesting difference between them.

This page compares the categories and the notable venues within them. The mechanics of the purchase itself — custody, verification, funding, order entry, withdrawal — live on how to buy bitcoin, and we have kept them off this page deliberately.

Exchanges: the default, with caveats

A crypto exchange runs a matching engine, holds customer fiat and crypto, and — in the United States — operates as a money transmitter and therefore a money services business registered with FinCEN, with state licences on top. That regulatory shape is why exchanges ask for identity documents and why they are the only category here that can offer deep liquidity, tight spreads and a support desk at the same time.

The category-wide criticism is the one we made on the buying guide and will make again here: almost every major exchange runs two pricing regimes for the same trade, and the default is the expensive one. Read the venue assessments below with that in mind, because the headline fee a platform advertises is frequently not the fee its typical customer pays.

Coinbase

The best-executed consumer crypto product in the market. Onboarding is clean, the app is reliable, and the education library is genuinely good rather than content marketing with a buy button attached. It is also the venue most people should start from if they want the path of least resistance.

Three honest weaknesses. The Simple versus Advanced Trade fee gap is the clearest dark pattern in the sector — the same trade, on the same account, at a small fraction of the price, hidden behind a tab most users never open. Support has historically been slow, which matters when your money is the thing that is stuck. And compliance-triggered account restrictions are poorly communicated: accounts get limited for reasons the customer is not told, which is legally understandable and still a bad experience.

One structural point worth knowing even if you never open an account: Coinbase Custody Trust Company is a New York limited-purpose trust company, a genuine qualified-custodian structure. That is precisely why most US spot Bitcoin ETF issuers use it, and why roughly 80% of all ETF-held bitcoin sits at one custodian — a concentration we examine on the issuers and custodians page.

Kraken

Kraken Pro is the best-balanced professional interface among US-accessible venues. It is powerful without being hostile — a real order book, real order types, and a layout that a competent adult can learn in an afternoon. Support is better than the sector norm, and the listing process is conservative, which is a safety feature and a breadth limitation depending on what you want to buy.

On the regulatory side Kraken holds a Wyoming SPDI charter through Kraken Financial and obtained MiCA authorisation via Ireland, which matters to European users in a way that few venues can currently claim. The main criticism is the same one as everywhere else: the consumer app and Pro are effectively separate products with separate pricing, and the consumer path costs several times more.

Gemini

The cleanest design in crypto and the strongest disclosure culture — Gemini publishes more, and more clearly, than most of its competitors. Gemini Trust Company is an NYDFS limited-purpose trust company, which alongside Coinbase Custody is the strongest US wrapper available for customer assets.

Two things must be said against it. Basic-mode pricing is among the worst in the industry, with a convenience fee stacked on top of a spread; ActiveTrader on the same account is far cheaper and the gap is large even by sector standards. And the Gemini Earn collapse — customer assets frozen in the Genesis failure, later resolved through bankruptcy proceedings and a settlement with the New York Attorney General — is a permanent and legitimate mark on its record. A strong custody structure on the exchange side did not protect customers who had opted into a yield product built on someone else's balance sheet. That is a lesson about products, not just platforms.

Crypto.com

Heavily marketed, extremely dense with products, and the venue where the app-versus-exchange price gap is most punishing and least signposted. The Exchange prices competitively and discounts further by CRO staking tier; the App, where most retail actually transacts, prices considerably worse, and card-funded purchases worse still. The staking tiers also make the true cost genuinely hard to compute in advance, which is not an accident. If you use it, use the Exchange.

Binance.US

Distinct from Binance.com, which does not serve US persons. Volumes collapsed after the June 2023 SEC action and the loss of USD banking rails; the SEC dismissed its case in 2025 and USD services were restored. The important point for a buyer is not the litigation history but the market structure that followed it: liquidity remains a fraction of its former levels and of its US competitors, and thin books mean worse effective execution regardless of the headline fee. That is a hidden cost no fee table shows. A venue with an attractive maker/taker schedule and a shallow book can easily be more expensive in practice than a rival charging more per trade.

Bitstamp and Bitfinex

Bitstamp is Europe's oldest major exchange, founded in 2011, with a long licensing history in Luxembourg and the UK and a clean, no-nonsense product. It was acquired by Robinhood, with the deal closing in 2025 — worth knowing because ownership changes tend to bring product changes.

Bitfinex has deep books, sophisticated order types, margin and lending, and is not available to US retail. Its shared ownership with Tether is a governance consideration a serious user should factor in rather than dismiss.

River

Bitcoin-only and US-only, and the venue we would single out on transparency grounds alone. River publishes a genuinely readable fee schedule — one of very few that does — offers zero-fee recurring buys, holds bitcoin on a full-reserve basis and publishes proof of reserves. In a sector where working out what you will be charged often requires opening an account first, that combination is unusual enough to be the strongest recommendation we can make on disclosure.

The limitations are the obvious ones: bitcoin only, US only, no trading tools to speak of. If you want ether, an index of alternatives or a chart with indicators on it, this is not the venue. If you want to buy bitcoin repeatedly and know exactly what it costs, it is close to ideal.

Order books

Payment apps

Payment apps sell bitcoin inside a product you already use for something else. That is the entire proposition, and for small occasional purchases it is a reasonable one. All four majors now let you withdraw to an external wallet, which was not true a few years ago and is the single most important improvement in this category.

Cash App sells bitcoin only. It discloses a service fee at the point of purchase and adds a spread on top, supports recurring buys, and withdraws both on-chain and over Lightning — the last of which is genuinely useful and rare in a mainstream consumer app.

PayPal and Venmo run on the same infrastructure and the same fee shape: tiered percentages that are proportionally worst on small purchases, which is awkward given that small purchases are exactly what the products are for. PayPal covers a handful of assets plus its own PYUSD stablecoin. Both have permitted withdrawal since 2022.

Strike is bitcoin-only, low-fee and Lightning-native, with a remittance product that is meaningfully better than the alternatives for cross-border payments. It is the most technically interesting venue in this category by some distance.

The verdict is straightforward. Strike and Cash App are the two genuinely competitive options here. PayPal and Venmo are convenience products priced as such — you are paying for the fact that the money is already in the app, and on a small purchase you are paying a lot for it.

Peer-to-peer marketplaces

A P2P marketplace is an advertisement board with an escrow service attached. A seller posts an offer; a buyer takes it; the platform locks the seller's bitcoin in escrow; the buyer sends payment by whatever method was agreed; the seller confirms receipt; escrow releases. Disputes go to platform arbitration, or in the non-custodial designs to a multisignature arrangement where neither party can move funds alone.

The model exists for a real reason. In countries with capital controls, unreliable banking or no local exchange, P2P is often the only way to convert between local currency and bitcoin, and it works. But the risks are severe and asymmetric, and they deserve to be stated before any discussion of price.

The venue landscape has changed sharply. LocalBitcoins ceased operations in February 2023, ending the platform that defined the category. Paxful shut abruptly in April 2023 and relaunched a month later under changed leadership; its co-founder pleaded guilty in 2024 to failing to maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering programme, and we could not confirm its current operating status — so we will not describe it as operating. Binance P2P is very large in emerging markets and is not available to US users.

Bisq and HodlHodl deserve to be described accurately rather than dismissed. Bisq is genuinely decentralised — a desktop application running over Tor with no central operator, security deposits from both sides, multisignature escrow and DAO-based arbitration. Bisq 2 addresses some of the usability problem. HodlHodl uses non-custodial multisig escrow with no identity checks, which removes exchange-failure risk and simultaneously removes all recourse against a fraudulent counterparty. Both are real answers to the question "how do I transact without permission from an intermediary". Neither is a good answer to "how do I buy bitcoin cheaply and quickly" — liquidity is thin, spreads are wide and the experience is slow. Choose them for what they are actually for.

Bitcoin ATMs

A bitcoin ATM takes cash and credits bitcoin to a wallet address you scan at the machine. The convenience is genuine and the price is indefensible.

Commissions commonly run 8% to 20% of the transaction, and sometimes above 20% once the operator's exchange-rate markup is counted on top — and the posted commission usually does not include that markup, so the number on the screen is not the number you pay. Coin ATM Radar is the standard reference for machine counts; the large operators include Bitcoin Depot, which is publicly listed, along with CoinFlip, Athena Bitcoin and RockItCoin.

The regulatory pressure on this category is intense and deserved. Data published by the Federal Trade Commission shows very large year-on-year increases in fraud losses at these machines, concentrated severely among older consumers through government-impersonation and tech-support scams — the script is always some version of "your account has been compromised, take the cash to this machine". Several states have responded with daily caps commonly around $1,000, fee caps, mandatory on-screen warnings and refund requirements for defrauded new customers. Specific statutes and effective dates vary by state and change frequently, so check your own before assuming a protection applies.

The verdict is not close. There is no scenario in which a person with a bank account and ten minutes is better off at a bitcoin ATM than on an exchange. The only genuine use case is converting physical cash without a banking relationship, and even then the price should make you think hard about whether the trip is necessary at all.

Recurring buys and DCA services

Dollar-cost averaging — buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule — is a sound behavioural tool for a volatile asset, and a whole product category has grown up around it. Be careful about the reason you choose one.

A recurring buy on a professional order book is usually cheaper than a dedicated DCA service, and River's zero-fee recurring buys compete directly on price with anything else in the market. The honest case for a bitcoin-only service is not cost. It is focus, custody clarity, education, and the absence of an altcoin casino sitting next to the buy button — which, for an investor who knows their own weaknesses, is a genuine feature and not a trivial one. Just do not tell yourself you are saving money if you are not.

The other route to the same behaviour is a scheduled purchase of a fund inside a brokerage account, which some brokers automate and some do not. If your bitcoin allocation lives in a retirement account, that may be the only mechanism available to you — the guide to buying a Bitcoin ETF covers how brokers handle it, and the broker comparison covers which ones support fractional and recurring orders at all.

Which venue for which buyer

Strip the detail away and the decision comes down to four cases.

You want bitcoin, you have a bank account, and you want it cheap. Use a licensed exchange, fund by bank transfer, trade on the order book, withdraw if you intend to self-custody. This covers the overwhelming majority of readers and every part of the process is on the buying guide.

You want a small position with no new accounts. A payment app is a defensible choice if it is Strike or Cash App. Accept that you are paying a convenience premium, keep it small, and check the withdrawal path works before the balance becomes meaningful.

You want exposure inside a retirement or brokerage account. No exchange answers that. A spot ETF does — the full list of US spot Bitcoin ETFs has every ticker and fee, the fee page works through what those cost over time, and our picks by investor type narrows it down. Outside the US, non-US listings matter because PRIIPs generally blocks European retail investors from US-listed funds entirely.

Your ticket is large enough to move the book. Above roughly six figures the question stops being which app and starts being which execution method. That is the subject of crypto OTC trading, and the short version is that a limit order on a deep book beats a desk for most people until the size is genuinely institutional.

Venue choice