Announced hours ago, European fiat onramp Bitpanda now supports ERC20-tokens, and will begin offering more ERC20 tokens for trade as time and internal vetting allows. For now, they have added OmiseGO (OMG), Augur (REP) and 0x (ZRX).
Coinimal to Bitpanda
Originally founded as Coinimal in 2014, the company rebranded as Bitpanda in June of 2016, though kept the same team. It is thus part of the ‘old guard’ of exchanges in crypto, and can show off a long history of reliable service and unbreached security. The exchange currently stands at some 60+ employees, and have 850,000 registered users.
Seated in Austria, the company focuses on the European market, open to business in member states of the EU, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Monaco. They maintain a mandatory KYC policy for users wishing to make purchases with fiat – however, unverified users and non-European users can make fiat withdrawals without going through KYC.
Originally offering only a Bitcoin/fiat pairing, Bitpanda has been slowly adding major coins over the years, and currently sits at sixteen different cryptocurrencies, including Pantos (PAN), a multi-blockchain currency being developed by Bitpanda themselves, which they hope will create a standard for cross chain value and information transfer. However, PAN is a young project and cannot as yet be withdrawn from Bitpanda, nor is it available to trade anywhere else.
With today’s announcement of ERC20 support, the number of currencies offered is expected to start growing more quickly, as – technically, at least, once general ERC20 support has been integrated, adding new tokens is quick and easy. Being a compliance focused exchange, however, they will still have to perform internal vetting before considering any particular token listing.
Compliant Exchanges on the Rise
Bitpanda has limited itself to a European market, primarily to be able to operate within the EU and be fully compliant with emerging regulations. Although the EU is not as yet in a rush to regulate the space, the trend across the world is certainly one of government moving toward either a ban of crypto, as in many authoritarian countries, or strict regulations in line with those governing other financial assets, as in Japan.
We also see crypto projects starting to anticipate this change, with some even proactively seeking out classification as a security for their token.
Full disclosure: The author has no monetary incentive to support Bitpanda, but they were my first entrypoint into crypto.
