CoinJar Review – Australia Bitcoin Exchange

One of Australia’s most interesting startups of 2016, CoinJar defines itself as a global personal finance company, which makes it possible for its users to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin and to make payments using the virtual currency, or other, fiat currencies. Despite being a relative late-comer to the crypto currency scene (it was launched in 2013),

CoinJar has racked up some 70,000 customers, especially from Australia and the US, and it’s gone through more than $100 million in processed transactions. The focus of the operation is on simplicity and security. Those who resort to the services offered by this exchange/payment service, are protected by multi-factor authentication. In addition to actually entering their account passwords, they will be verified via SMS. To make sure that no large-scale digital currency theft can occur under any circumstances, CoinJar keep the majority of their clients’ digital assets offline.

The About Us section of CoinJar.com, the official site of the operation, is not tight-lipped at all Babout the corporate background of the operator and the people behind the startup. It’s easy to learn that the business entity handling the European billing and clearing services for CoinJar is CoinJar UK Ltd, based at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, registered in the UK under company number 8905988. CoinJar has apparently moved its operation to the UK in 2014.

The two founders of the CoinJar service are Asher Tan and Ryan Zhou. General inquiries regarding the activity of the operation can be directed to info@coinjar.com. For business inquiries, business@coinjar.com should be used. Interestingly, customer support information is only available to those who have a registered account with the service.

How Does CoinJar Work?

Covered by various mainstream media bigwigs, such as Forbes, Reuters, The Guardian and The Australian – among others – CoinJar looks like a legitimate operation indeed. It doesn’t promise its customers too-good-to-be-true returns, nor does it peddle any suspicious bitcoins-for-nothing schemes.

CoinJar’s services are focused on money management, facilitating the spending, trading and sending of various currencies and crypto currencies. The supported currency-pool is currently limited to USD, GBP and BTC.

The spending aspect of the service is one of its main attractions. Through it, users can pay anyone, anywhere in the world, in under 6 seconds, with zero fees involved. Making purchases with Bitcoin is possible through the CoinJar mobile app, CoinJar Touch, by scanning QR codes, through Bitcoin address, through CoinJar username and through CoinJar Swipe, a special EFTPOS Bitcoin card. Through this virtual network of services, one can pay for anything with bitcoins, even small, mundane purchases such as a cup of coffee.

CoinJar Touch makes it easy for users to transfer bitcoins back and forth and to transfer virtual currency between different accounts at CoinJar. A bank account can also be added to the fold, rounding out one’s financial profile.

A total of 196 countries are covered by CoinJar’s Bitcoin sending service. CoinJar trading comes with transparent fees (usually 1%) and proper support for a change.

At the end of the day, CoinJar wants to be much more than a Bitcoin wallet or a digital currency exchange. It is said to be the fastest way to access one’s money from anywhere in the world.

The CoinJar Website

The domain authority of Coinjar.com is decent at 43/100 and its spam rating is 0. Everything seems to point to the fact that we are indeed dealing with a legitimate operator here. Some 16 unique domains link to coinjar.com, every one of them reputable and relevant for the vertical. There’s a lot of user discussion out there about coinjar and thus there are some spammy back-links in that profile too, but nothing unexpected and out of the ordinary. The coinjar.com domain was first registered in 2000, so it is now 17 years old.

The organization which registered the domain is indeed CoinJar UK Ltd. and the registrant information is public.

CoinJar User Feedback

CoinJar’s crew has always been in close contact with the community, putting everything up for debate, from the actual domain name of the operation (which in the beginning was coinjar.io, as coinjar.com was held hostage by a domain squatter), to the technology powering their virtual currency wallet. While most customer feedback was and is positive, there are some complaints, mostly regarding the speed with which bitcoins are delivered to buyers’ CoinJar wallets. Though the operation claims to make instant transfers, there were users out there who made their deposits on a Friday and didn’t get their bitcoins transferred till Monday.

Others have pointed out that none of the other Australian Bitcoin sellers required personal information from their customers.

At various times, the CoinJar platform was overwhelmed by user demand, and there were times when the team had to fall back to manual processing.

While most of the relevant CoinJar community chatter takes place at bitcointalk.org, there are a few Reddit topics open where – mixed in with overwhelmingly positive reviews – there are a few complaints present too. One such complaint states that the operator didn’t deliver the required bitcoins to one of its users 10 days after a deposit had been made. Negative feedback-wise, one always has to exercise at least some level of caution though: crooked competitors may attempt to wreck the reputation of a company through fake complaints.

CoinJar Review Conclusion

Everything considered, CoinJar seems to be a legitimate operation indeed. Unlike some of the other similar services we have thus far reviewed, their corporate profile is spotless and transparent, the CEOs don’t shy away from taking part in community discussions about the services their company offers, and the user feedback is indeed overwhelmingly positive. Yes, there have apparently been hiccups with the service, but malicious intent on the part of the operator cannot really be proved.

Negative reviews are few and far between, and most of them seem to have been solved amicably a long time ago. The CoinJar support staff is responsive and helpful for the most part, which – considering the nature of the industry and the general trends in this respect – is quite an asset indeed.

Update (November 26, 2017): Since we first posted this review, negative feedback about Coinjar has piled up. More and more people complain about their funds getting stuck in limbo at the site, due to the lengthy approval procedures, or who knows what. The support side of the operation seems to be non-existent, when it comes to sorting out these problems. While some of the stuck-funds issues do end up sorted out, there are people out there who genuinely feel that they have lost their monies to Coinjar. Whatever the case, in this day and age, keeping users’ funds hung up for several weeks, without word from support, is not proper MO. That said, the positive feedback is still there. Some people seem happy with their Coinjar experience, and indeed, many of these people are verified users of the service.

The bottom line is that while Coinjar cannot be called a scam, something is certainly not right about it. We wouldn’t like tens of thousands of dollars of our own stuck in limbo either. This is unacceptable, even if it only happens once in a blue moon. With that in mind, we’ll have to caution users against readily transferring significant funds to the operator, at least until this funds-in-limbo/inexistent-support act is cleaned up.

What’s your experience with CoinJar? Are you among those who consider it a scam or are you happy with the exchange? Drop a comment below and let us know!

Other good cryptocurrency exchanges for Australian residents include Binance, Changelly, and LocalBitcoins.

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