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How many times did you have to sell some of the cryptocurrencies you really believed in just because you needed some cash ASAP? Quite a few, right? If only there was a way to borrow fiat money and leave your portfolio intact…
Well, there’s a way. You can take out loans from various financial service platforms, one of which is CoinLoan. This crypto lending platform also makes it possible for your idle tokens to start generating passive income, without even asking you to lock them away.
In this CoinLoan review, we’re going through all of its features and functionalities, pros and cons, and safety matters so you don’t have to do the hard work.
What is Coin Loan and How It Works?
CoinLoan was launched several years ago to solve the most common pain-points crypto investors deal with (one of which is untimely selling). It is one of the most popular crypto lending platforms, although it allows users to store, buy, sell, and swap tokens as well.
So, it’s safe to say that it acts like a unique and versatile ecosystem you can use for managing your entire crypto portfolio, and, more importantly, expanding it.
The best part? Everything is just a few clicks and minutes away, loans are approved almost instantly, there is no such thing as prepayment fees or deposits and there is absolutely no paperwork involved (woohoo) when requesting a loan.
CoinLoan – Loans and Borrowing
CoinLoan enables users to get fiat money quickly without selling any promising tokens. In fact, you’ll get it automatically after you click the “get the loan button” (yup, it’s that simple).
The only requirement to borrow the money is to already have a collateral asset to secure the loan with. In other words, CoinLoan will ask for no credit checks while your credit ratings don’t matter at all, either.
Keep in mind you won’t be able to borrow less than 20% or more than 70% of your collateral’s value. This loan/collateral value ratio is widely known as an LTV (loan to value) ratio.
Lower LTV kind of protects you from collateral liquidation while higher LTV increases the chances of liquidation so you’d have to act fast to prevent it. If you want to sleep safe and sound even during sharp drops, make sure to go for a lower LTV option (20 to 35% ideally).
Which assets can be used as collateral? Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Ripple, Polkadot, and a couple more, or you can use PAXG (stablecoin).
This platform offers other kinds of loans besides the crypto-to-fiat loans – crypto-to-crypto (for instance, BTC to ETH or XRP to DOT) and fiat-to-crypto (you can use Euro and stable coins) as well as short-term and long-term loans that make it even more versatile and flexible.
To get back hold on your cryptocurrencies, you have to repay the loan. If needed, you can take out as many loans as you wish. Provided you’ve chosen a short-term loan (7 days to one month), you’d make just one payment, while long-term loans involve monthly payments.
CoinLoan lets you repay your loan early and doesn’t charge any extra pennies. A good thing is that you can repay it in other currencies and you are not obliged to stick with the current loan currency.
If you decide to repay your loan in full early, you’ll be able to liquidate your collateral. This might be a wise decision to make if you see that your collateral is hitting the dirt. On the contrary, if your collateral is moving onward, you can repay your loan fully with just a part of it and then withdraw the rest.
If you ignore the notifications sent to your email and fail to repay your loan(s), and if there are not enough loan currency funds in your wallet, the system will automatically liquidate the appropriate amount of your collateral.
You can, at any moment, check the status of your loan(s) in the My Loan section. The Instant Loan widget can help you calculate the needed amount of collateral if you want to get a loan or the amount of asset you can borrow based on the amount of collateral in your wallet. We highly recommend experimenting with different amounts, periods, and LTVs before actually requesting a loan.
CoinLoan – Interest Account
CoinLoan is a platform built for borrowers and lenders alike. Their interest accounts are like bank accounts, but way better, since their interest rates are quite attractive and a thousand times higher than the rates offered by banks.
Currently, CoinLoan offers interest rates starting from 3% (which is a base rate) and going up to 12.3%. They guarantee that their users can earn up to 10% annual interest no matter if the platform itself reinvests their money or not.
Your money will start working for you literally from the first minute after you deposit it while 100$ is the minimum deposit amount. Interest is paid on a monthly basis, on the first of each month. It goes without saying that, the longer your assets sit on your crypto interest account, the more interest you will accumulate over time.
CoinLoan doesn’t charge deposit fees or lock your assets so you can have them at any time. If you want to withdraw money from your interest account, make sure to request a withdrawal before 2 PM UTC since all the operations are executed by this time, every day. And if you send a request after 2 PM UTC, your order will remain pending until the next day.
Coin Loan – Exchange
Unlike other lending platforms out there, CoinLoan allows you to trade – buy and sell your digital assets almost with your eyes closed. Some of the supported assets include Euro, USDT, USD, BUSD, ETH, SOL, DOT, and LINK just to name a few.
So, instead of switching between different savings accounts and crypto exchanges (and, needless to say, wasting a ton of money on fees), you can enjoy all of these functionalities within a single app.
The platform offers favorable exchange rates that are updated every 30 seconds. The minimum exchange amount for Euro is 20, Bitcoin 0.001, Ethereum 0.01, Polkadot 2, and so on.
Coin Loan Token
CoinLoan token features interesting utilities and provides multiple benefits to holders. Your annual interest actually depends on this token. The more CLT you have, the higher the interest rate. It can also double down your borrowing fees and can be used as collateral.
To start seeing the benefits of CLT, you should have at least 125 tokens on your account, which will raise your interest account rate by 0.1%. Hold 375 CLTs, and you’ll raise them by 0.3%.
Even better, if you hold 2,500 CLT, you’d be earning +2% interest compared to the platform’s base rates. That means that you can easily start earning 7.2% interest on BTC and 12.3% on USDT.
The CoinLoan team has plans on launching their loyalty program this year. Depending on the amount of CLT tokens you hold, you’ll be able to reap even more perks (higher staking shares, higher discounts on loan interests, free ETH withdrawals, etc).
Users will be ranked based on the number of tokens they hold and divided into categories (starter, value, advanced, performance). You can unstake your tokens anytime but keep in mind that doing so would make your interest rates basic again.
CLT total supply is 22 million and the circulating supply is 1.95 million. It is currently trading at $13.3 while its all-time high is $39. If you don’t want to use CoinLoan but have faith that their token will go up, you can buy it on UniSwap, Bittrex, Hotbit, and HitBTC.
Is CoinLoan Regulated?
Yes, it is! CoinLoan is a licensed lending platform based in North Europe, Estonia, and it is regulated by the Estonian Law.
To make sure everything they do is compliant with international and European regulations, the CoinLoan team sticks with complex anti-money laundering and know-your-customer procedures. You can easily spot that they hold two European Financial Licenses if you take a closer look at the bottom of each page on their website.
Is CoinLoan Safe and Secure?
Again, yes. The platform doesn’t store your private keys, all of the transactions are signed offline, while most of their users’ digital assets are stored on multisig wallets (cold wallets that require more than 2 private keys).
They also use TOTP 2FA (two-factor authentication) to provide another layer of security to their users since SMS 2FA or U2F are proven to be not so efficient when it comes to account protection.
To ensure the highest security and privacy of their website, CoinLoan launched a bug bounty program. This makes it seamless to discover and react as soon as bugs and vulnerabilities come up, while the system itself has never been compromised until this day, which contributed to building a good reputation. After all, if it wasn’t like this, CoinLoan wouldn’t be operating successfully since 2018.
CoinLoan – Likes and Dislikes
CoinLoan operates worldwide, offers competitive interest rates, and makes borrowing both fiat and cryptocurrency a breeze. The platform charges no fees for deposits while deposited money never gets frozen. It supports 20 assets, compared to BlockFi which supports 13, or Salt which supports 9.
The ease of use is indisputable, from interacting with either web or mobile app, to lending and trading. Speaking of CoinLoan’s mobile app, you can use it to trade and borrow crypto on the go in just a few taps. The app is free to download and both iOS and Android users can get it.
On the downside, if you don’t stake CLT, your interest rewards will be significantly lower. For now, you still can’t get a loan in US dollars, although this option will become available soon. CoinLoan’s loans are affected by the volatile nature of crypto markets, which means that LTV can reach 80 to 90% if the value of collateral drops down.
Of course, you won’t be left hanging if this happens. You’ll get an email notification about your loan’s status and things you can do to regain control. First, you can rebalance your LTV by adding more collateral, make a full early or partial loan repayment, or just ignore the email (not recommendable).
CoinLoan Review – Summary
CoinLoan is a single platform to manage, borrow, and lend your funds in an easy-peasy way. It is safe, secure, easy to use, and offers decent interest rates as well, which ticks all of the boxes when it comes to crypto lending platforms.
Still, keep in mind that, although we tried to cover all the important aspects in this CoinLoan review, the way this platform operates and its interest rates can be subject to change so do your own research before investing your money or cryptos.
FAQ
What are CoinLoan fees?
As already mentioned, CoinLoan charges no fee for crypto and fiat deposits. Also, they do not charge any interest account operation fees.
When borrowing money, you can choose between two fee options – loan currency (1% fee of the overall loan is charged) or CLT (provided you hold some of these tokens, you will get a 50% fee discount).
With CoinLoan, you can withdraw ETH or any other ERC-20 token, including CLT, once per month without paying any fees. Other withdrawal fees depend on the token. For instance, you’ll be paying 1 LINK for withdrawing your LINK tokens, 0.005 ETH for ETH withdrawals, etc.
However, the best thing of all is that CoinLoan doesn’t charge any fees for certain types of withdrawals. Here, you can check the fee table. Any coins not listed in this table and supported on CoinLoan are not subject to fees.
As we already mentioned – if you, for any reason, don’t repay your loan in a timely manner, the system will liquidate some of your funds. In this case, a 7% liquidation fee is paid.
If you are using CoinLoan’s exchange, you won’t be charged any fees for processing transactions.
How to withdraw funds from CoinLoan?
CoinLoan enables EUR withdrawals via SWIFT and SEPA. Go to your wallet, choose the desired currency, and select a preferred payment method. Once you do this, enter the amount you want to withdraw (minimum 10 EUR), fill out the beneficiary form (first and last name, IBAN, and BIC), and click the final withdraw button.
To withdraw EUR via SWIFT, again, go to your wallet, select the desired payment method, fill out the form, and click withdraw. However, keep in mind that 5,000 EUR is the minimum amount you can withdraw if you decide to go with this payment method.
Pound sterling (GBP) funds can be deposited and withdrawn via SWIFT as well while USD transfers (both deposits and withdrawals) are temporarily not available. The platform suggests opting for USDC as an alternative.
To withdraw crypto from your CoinLoan account, go to your crypto wallet, select the desired currency, enter the amount of crypto you want to send to another address, and click withdraw. The platform will ask you for another transaction confirmation for security reasons.
Note that cryptocurrency withdrawal processes can last up to several hours since different cryptocurrencies have different transaction speeds.
What are the benefits of the CoinLoan Refer a Friend program?
Spread the word about CoinLoan and you will get rewarded. Their Refer a Friend program is, as you can guess, a referral program that gives you a 0.1% reward on interest account holdings and a 0.2% reward for every loan and exchange amount.
The more your friends and family use the platform, the higher rewards for you. Still, you can also choose between keeping rewards for yourself or sharing them with people who sign up via your link (75:25 and 50:50 reward ratio).
If you decide to share rewards, keep in mind that your referrals won’t receive bonuses from interest accounts but crypto exchange and loan bonuses only. As new referrals sign up via your link, bonuses (calculated in USDC) will be automatically deposited into your account.
Does CoinLoan have any insurance?
Yes, CoinLoan chose BitGo, one of the biggest names when it comes to digital asset custody. Their impressive $250 million policy covers users’ cryptocurrencies and digital money in case of insider theft, theft, or loss of private keys.
What are some solid alternatives to CoinLoan?
If CoinLoan doesn’t seem like a platform that would fulfill all of your needs, there are other crypto lenders such as YouHolder or Nexo you might want to check out.
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