DISCLAIMER#1: I am not a financial advisor. All contents on this blog are solely my own personal views and for Cryptocurrency Trading education/entertainment purposes only. Cryptocurrency Trading is very risky. Losses can exceed deposits. Enter with discretion.
DISCLAIMER#2: Please keep in mind that the prices of digital currencies are volatile. Prices may go up or down at any time.
Today, I am going to feature one of the cryptocurrency custodial wallets that I am using since I got hooked and become a Crypto enthusiast.
Have you ever wondered why coinsph sell price of Bitcoin is cheaper compared with the buy price? ;-)
At the end of my article, my goal here is to explain why coinsph crypto exchange fees are high compared with others. Including how coinsph able to do the exchange itself.
I will only talk about the features of coinsph connected to cryptocurrencies. However, this app offers a lot besides exchanging cryptos!
As far as I know, coinsph is Philippines’ only cryptocurrency custodial wallet right now wherein we can buy and sell cryptos in exchange of our pesos at will. If you have other Philippine-based custodial wallets like coinsph, please feel free to let me know by commenting below this article.
No one teach me about cryptocurrencies, I just keep on hearing and seeing them all over the internet. Then one day, I got curious. I asked myself, what are they?
Can money really turn into a digital currency that we can’t hold nor touch but has value like real money? Some people say that electronic money already existed like PayPal but they are not the same to be honest. In contrary, money that is in PayPal is still the same fiat currency like the real money! It’s hard to explain but let me put it this way, supposed that I went to Metrobank and I want to exchange my 10,000 pesos to US Dollar at 48 pesos per 1 dollar. That gives me around 208.33 dollars which I requested to be put on my PayPal account, then after the transaction has been successfully made, it appeared on my PayPal account online! So the example I gave shows that it’s the same physical money that I put on PayPal which turned to electronic money but not in cryptocurrency form!
Most people at the moment especially in my country don’t understand the exact meaning of a cryptocurrency. It has its own value, utility and nature that are entirely different than regular existing fiat currencies like the Philippine Peso and Australian Dollar, etc.
There are only 3 Philippine-based platforms that I considered and used as my digital wallets:
Both are good digital wallets we can use for online transactions like buying game credits, paying bills, electronic mobile loads (Smart, Globe, Sun, Talk-n-Text) but coinsph stands above.
Why? I will be straight-forward to say that only coinsph allows me to use the said app both on my mobile phone and pc/laptop. They offer the best rebate on buying load service at 10% though cap has been increased upon reaching 2,000 Pesos limit, it will then become 5% and resets monthly.
Full info here:
https://coins.ph/blog/announcements-buy-load-service-updates-aug-2020/
And there’s more! One thing I love and like about coinsph is that, it becomes my custodial cryptocurrency wallet! The other 2 digital wallets like GCash and Paymaya don’t have feature like that yet! Hoping they add that in the near future but if that happens, I stick with my coinsph. We never know if they offer lower spreads/fees on buying/selling cryptos which I will discuss more later in this article.
The coinsph is my first cryptocurrencies stop, that means it’s a bridge before I can trade to crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Bitstamp, and etc. I will need to buy/exchange my Philippine Pesos first to the cryptocurrency I prefer like the XRP inside the coinsph wallet applying their current spread rates. Let me put it this way, the spread rates are coinsph’s way to generate profit! The app itself is a running business that needs revenue to maintain their platform technically and pays the employees. Not a big deal. That is why I understand why coinsph exchange rates on cryptos are high!
Why do I mention that coinsph is acting like a bridge? If you want to ask me why I can’t go straight with the other exchanges like Binance? Simple, it is because I strongly not advice anyone to buy cryptocurrencies of your choice using credit cards! Read again my disclaimer above!
For more information about using credit cards on purchasing cryptos:
https://www.thebalance.com/can-you-use-a-credit-card-to-purchase-cryptocurrency-4161297
The other thing that I want to add is, by using coinsph as a bridge I can directly transfer the cryptos I bought or sold into pesos to my bank account through instapay right in my home! No hassle. Period. Very convenient to use now that we are experience COVID-19 pandemic and I don’t want to go out to protect myself!
I joined coins.ph last Aug 11, 2017.
But I got verified last April 2018 only!
Why is that? I remind you that joining is a lot different than using the app! Very self-explanatory.
Alright, let’s move on. To make the long story short, presently I am now enjoying the benefits of a level 3 coinsph account! :-)
Initially, upon activation of coinsph account, we have 3 cryptocurrency wallets:
BTC
BCH
XRP
Actually a 4th one when you click the top right icon per image below:
It becomes another BTC wallet if you prefer to receive Bitcoins from outside sources straight converted to pesos. I find it as the solution on volatility concerns of crypto I guess. ;-)
Normally newly created accounts don’t have ETH wallet.
To unlock ETH wallet, we need to pay 80 Pesos, what? It was 20 pesos before when I activated mine, I even forgot its date already, sigh, inflation again!
The choice is yours!
Take note that I am using PC/Laptop version and may look differently on mobile versions. Bear with me this inconvenience!
I will not make this article long, so I will discuss the folllowing:
How does coinsph facilitate the PHP/Cryptocurrency exchange at will?
A good question, and it took me a lot of time figuring it out. No one told me about these things, this are all my observations and it might be 100% wrong!
The answer lies within the said wallet itself!
I noticed in the wallet’s interface the word “Powered by COINSPRO“.
Then I clicked it, seeing:
I tried to register but it doesn’t accept applications at the moment. :-(
I highly suspect that the coinsph and coinspro are sister companies. Or I maybe wrong. Who knows!
As we go on, I will explain how coinsph takes profits from our cryptocurrencies wallet base on our purchase whether we buy or sell our cryptos.
I will take the XRP as an example. Please do note that these are all my own observations!
I am wondering why XRP buy and sell price are not the same.
Why Buy XRP is more expensive than Sell XRP? I don’t have much time explaining it here and that would be another topic.
If you want to find out, read the article below:
https://www.colfinancial.com/ape/final2/home/online_trading.asp
If we subtract Buy XRP Price: 14.45 to Sell XRP Price: 14.29, we get 0.16 as difference or simply its spread. Which doesn’t make sense at all. :-(
However, when I went to:
https://exchange.coins.asia/trade/?selectedInstrument=8
I see the bid and ask prices here which are very different with coinsph’s Buy and Sell XRP prices! The Bid price is 14.38 and the Ask price is 14.33. And the difference or spread here is quite low range at 0.05 compared with coinsph 0.16! A huge difference right? ;-)
Even though that I didn’t manage to create an account in coinspro because they are not accepting account registration at the moment, I am still glad that I was able to see the Bid and Ask prices. Why? Because by that, I somehow got the idea on why coinsph exchange rate fees are high as I mentioned earlier. And this is where the trick lies! (Read the title of this article above) hehehe :-)
Before we continue, for more info about what bid and ask prices:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bid-and-ask.asp
The coinsph act as the midman between us and coinspro! That could be one of the reason that we can’t register in coinspro right now, take note these are all my wild ideas! So I might be 100% wrong… ;-)
The different spreads that we saw earlier:
coinsph – 0.16
coinspro – 0.05
Determine coinsph’s margin. In short, if someone buys XRP, coinsph will facilitate the exchange between that person and coinspro. So coinsph will buy low the XRP available in th coinspro exchange at Bid Price 14.38 pesos per XRP and will then sell high with its own sell price at 14.45 pesos per XRP to that person which is demanding for XRP! I am not an economics expert, but the law of supply and demand here shows!
We can now able to see the profit of coinsph for that certain 1 XRP transaction! Are you excited? ;-)
By subtracting the coinsph sell price at 14.45 with coinspro bid price 14.38, we get a difference of 0.07! That is now coinsph’s profit from the trade on 1 XRP demand! This profit is what we call now trading/exchange fees.
We need to understand that coinsph is a running business like facebook that even we use them for free, they will get fees for services like this. The facebook generates income through advertisement purchases. ;-)
The same goes for the person who wants to sell his XRP. This time coinsph check coinspro’s Ask price at 14.33, then we subtract this to coinsph Sell price at 14.29. We get a difference of 0.04 which is quiet small compared with the buy price difference of 0.07. This could be the underlying factor why the Buy Price is more expensive that the Sell Price. So coinsph generate 0.04 PHP profit from someone who wants to sell his 1 XRP on coinsph.
So I will now give the trick on how and when to buy or sell any cryptocurrency you like in coinsph. Are you ready for this trick? ;-)
This trick is done best using laptop/pc using mouse to copy and paste. They are a lot faster than using mobile phones.
Cryptocurrencies are very volatile meaning they can go up or down even just in seconds interval!
We take Bitcoin as an example.
Always check the Buy and Sell Prices at the top left corner of coinsph before you buy or sell!
Then head over to coinspro website again. Read the texts very carefully that I shared in the image!
If you see lots in green, BUY ASAP in coinsph before the BUY prices there go higher again!
Otherwise, if you see lots in red, then it’s time to sell your bitcoins ASAP before the Sell prices go cheaper/lower even more!
This applies to any cryptocurrencies available in coinsph. I just use Bitcoin and XRP as examples.
I hope I manage to answer the question:
Have you ever wondered why coinsph sell price of Bitcoin are cheaper compared with the buy price? ;-)
So that’s all! Thank you so much for reading this article.
I hope you learned something new. Please feel free to share this to your friends and family.
God bless!
I started using coins.ph last year. I mainly used to buy mobile load because it offer high rebates. Thanks for sharing your knowledge about cryptocurrency and coins.ph . It's very helpful for us.