I am really a big fan of simple and safe exchanges, especially since large centralized exchanges get hacked all the time. So in my opinion it's imperative to eliminate counterparty-risk as much as possible, so instant conversion exchanges are my favorite.

There starts to appear many exchanges of this kind, instant taker exchanges where you can convert 1 cryptocurrency into another in a pretty short amount of time without having to store large amounts in a custodian-like setup. The way this works is that the website is basically a taker, that just connects to makers (Poloniex,Bittrex, etc..) via their API system and buys from the lowest price or sells at the highest price on your behalf. Basically like a trading bot that executes orders at the lowest rate possible.

Changelly is like this, and I have grown to like this exchange very much due to it's simplicity mainly. It's very easy to use it. So Changelly is pretty much my favorite exchange at the moment, both me and my accountant use it to exchange cryptocurrencies.

Well I have not found any drawback to using Changelly, I know this sounds weird but it's really true, maybe the fact that not all cryptocurrencies are available there, but pretty much most of the most popular ones are there, including EDG which I have talked about a lot. So it looks like Changelly was the first quick exchange to add EDG after the main exchanges. It supports currently 61 coins, which is pretty cool, that includes also ETH based tokens like EDG, Golem and others.

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Ok so let's see the Benefits then, if I haven't found drawbacks:

Fast:

In my experience the swap can take from anywhere to 3 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the cryptocurrency being traded, and the size of the order, and the confirmation speed of the coin. Usually for amounts like 100-200$ worth, it's about 5 minutes in my experience and from what I've heard. So I guess for most people who exchange quick coins like Steem or ETH, your average trade would take about 4-5 minutes.

Trustworthy:

It looks like the site is operated by the Minergate team which is a very reputable mining pool since 2014 with 46.72 GH/s mining power worth of miners trusting it. Also me personally and my accountant have exchanged here over 25,000$ worth of cryptocurrencies and had 0 issues while doing so. So we can trust them. But it's not just us but also many crypto celebrities like:

• Charlie Shrem: https://twitter.com/CharlieShrem/status/835537948225454084
• Borishaifa: https://steemit.com/money/@borishaifa/thank-you-changelly-spasibo-changelly
• Ryan Dugan: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1435275.msg16867987#msg16867987
• Donald Ness: https://twitter.com/Programmarchy/status/813423970372325376

Fees:

Pretty decent fees. I personally have not seen anything out of the ordinary. It's about 0.5% (+/- a small variance if the market price changes), so for example for one of my transactions the fee was 0.55%. This is institutional grade fees, I mean on main exchanges you see fees like 0.1% or 0.2% so it's pretty reasonable compared to that and given the convenience it's OK. I mean you would have to sign up to those exchanges, which would be very inconvenient given how much hassle that takes (Changelly only needs an e-mail), and you would have to leave an order open there to buy, but if the price moves up then you can miss it, if the price moves down in another exchange you can miss that too. With Changelly, you let their bot to find you the best exchange rate to position your order in, so you might actually end up buying at lower price, so even if the fee is higher, it might still cost you less in total. This is why I love Changelly.

Privacy:

Well they only need an e-mail and that is also just so that if very rarely something bad happens (which never happened to me though) you can contact the support or they can contact you.

Other than that, they don't need your phone number, they don't need your ID, they don't need your fingerprint. So in this sense it's perfect for privacy conscious users.

Simple:

It's extremely simple to use, just enter your e-mail address there, you don't even need to verify it, but it's advantageous if you want to use it multiple times, they will send your password in e-mail which you can change after.

After that it's just a few more clicks, that's all it takes to swap your cryptocurrencies. So basically you just enter the address where you want to get your exchanged coin, and then you send the coins from your wallet to the address they show you there.

Then wait like 5 minutes and you get your coins in your other wallet. It's really so simple that even your grandma can use it.

The only thing you need to look out for is to make sure that you enter the crypto-address correctly, because a mistyped address can cause financial loss, so I am just using CTRL+C CTRL+V for that reason and then double checking it to make sure it's the correct address character-by-character.

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That's it, Safe & Easy coin exchange! You can Sign Up Here:

Join Changelly Here