Mercatox – Electronic P2P Exchange Review

Mercatox Reputation

Just from a cursory glance, Mercatox’s poor user reviews should be enough to raise eyebrows. The firm is unregulated and has no address listed on their webpage.

Mercatox has a 1.7 star (out of 5) rating on Trustpilot. Nearly every review is 1-star, with users citing withdrawal issues, trades taking days to process, constant maintenance issues, money going missing, and some trades never completing even after months or even years of waiting.

There were a few five star reviews, but some of these were mistakes by the users who called the site a scam in their actual comments. With so many other quality crypto exchanges available, trading with Mercatox is taking an unnecessary risk.

Mercatox is a cryptocurrency exchange that offers peer-to-peer trading on hundreds of different digital assets. From their website, very little information is available. The information that is provided is poorly written and doesn’t inspire confidence.

Mercatox Fees and Trading Conditions

Mercatox charges a flat fee per trade of 0.25%. This is higher than many of the top crypto exchanges which charge 0.1% or less, like Binance.

Fees are not my major concern with this exchange. While 0.25% per trade is higher than some exchanges, it’s still lower than some other popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase (if trading small amounts).

The main issue is the spreads. On Binance, for example, the spread for buying/selling BTC/USDT (Bitcoin/Tether) is usually one to a few dollars. Compare that to Mercatox, where it is often $1,000 or more! This means there are very few people trading on the platform. This can be extremely costly if you want to get into or out of trades quickly.

The highest bid in the middle of the US session, for example, was $22,400, while the lowest offer was $26,440. That’s more than $4000 apart. You can of course place your own bids and offers in between these and hopefully someone will trade with you at a better rate.

Here is an example of the order history on Mercatox for BTC/USDT, one of the most commonly traded crypto pairs.

First, you will notice extremely little volume and few transactions. One transaction goes through about every 20-30 minutes. The sizes (in BTC) are also relatively small, under $1000 in value.

Look at the orders at 10:21 and 10:48 (top two). A sale goes through at 25,510 and a buy goes through at 22,579. That means there was a monster spread of almost $3000.

Imagine if you paid $25.5K only to see other orders going through at $22.5. A $3K difference on approximately $25K is more than 10%. That is even worse than AAATrade which has a roughly $800 spread when trading Bitcoin.

There is a flip side to this. Someone is getting good prices while someone else is losing way more than they need to (compared to if they traded on another exchange). This may be alluring. You could sit and wait for someone to give you a great price.

But also recall the various user reviews warning that you may not be able to get your funds out. The crypto you purchased may take days or even months to show up in your account, and in some cases, it may never show up. Therefore, the chance of making profit off of these massive spreads is still minimal. You may end up with no money/crypto at all.

Mercatox Deposit and Withdrawal Choices

If you choose to risk trading with Mercatox, you can deposit and withdraw in crypto only.

You can’t deposit, withdraw, or trade in fiat currencies. You can trade crypto to crypto, and you can only deposit and withdraw crypto. This means you need to transfer crypto into your Mercatox e-wallet, and you can only transfer crypto our of your e-wallet to another one.

For verified users, there is a maximum withdrawal of 5 BTC (or equivalent) per 24 hour period. For unverified users, the maximum daily withdrawal limit is 0.5 BTC (or equivalent). The following sheet shows the withdrawal fees, as well as the minimum deposit and withdrawal amounts.

Some of the coins on this list have no trading activity for a long time, showing at this list (provided by Mercatox on their website) likely hasn’t been updated in years.

If you’re looking for another broker that prioritizes cryptocurrency withdrawals and deposits, check out Binarycent.

Mercatox Trading Platform

Another red flag is that Mercatox’s trading platform is about as outdated as a crypto trading platform could be.

Mercatox doesn’t have a trading app, which puts it way behind its competitors. You need to log in to the Mercatox website directly to trade.

While monitoring the platform for a couple hours, the prices never changed, the bids and offers didn’t change. Only occasionally was there a spam comment in the chat box. This is no “Level II” showing where all the current bids and offers are (and their volume), only the highest bid and offer are shown.

The platform only updates when there is trading activity, and as discussed in the Trading Conditions section, very few transactions ever go through. Note the high and low price for this day was a high of 26,442 and a low of 22,235. Volume for the whole day is only 22,647 USDT.

Just for comparison, let’s compare that to Binance. For the same day it shows a high of 26,970 and a low of 24,620 with 14.5 billion USDT traded.

Binance tracks the actual price thousand of traders are willing to pay at any time. Mercatox doesn’t, because hardly anyone is trading on the platform.

Mercatox Loyalty Program

Mercatox claims to have a loyalty program that offers discounts on trading fees and interest on deposits

You can gain such bonuses — which are undisclosed and will be “updated on a regular basis” according to the company webpage on the matter — by referring other people to the website.  While many exchanges do offer “referral” bonuses, most exchanges focus on trading. If you trade more, you are rewarded with cheaper rates, for example.

Mercatox doesn’t offer bonuses for trading — just getting others to sign up. Also, receiving interest isn’t really a bonus. Almost every exchange offers interest on crypto deposits if you opt in to receiving it.

Mercatox Support and Education

Mercatox does provide support, but even still, many users complain about the lack of help available when you need it. It offers very little education on crypto, trading, or how to use the platform.

Mercatox does not offer phone or live chat support. You can only talk to them via email or by opening a support ticket. Open a support ticket here: https://support.mercatox.com/

Contact Mercatox via email here: [email protected]. The Mercatox website does not offer guidance, information, or educational resources on how to trade crypto or how to use the trading platform.

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