Hey folks, so although I rarely ever transact at all on Crypto.com, occasionally I’ll still go on because there are some tokens that are listed there that are a bit harder to get elsewhere ($RUNE being one of them). Additionally, I’ll sometimes do their check-ins for free diamonds rewards, or else I’ll simply check out my small $CRO bag which is still down around 60–70% since I bought in.
I’ve written some pretty negative (but honest) articles in the past about CDC’s prepaid visa cards and how they keep getting nerfed, but for today’s article, I’m focusing on something else that caught my attention — Crypto.com’s trading promotions, the most recent being a $10,000 prize pool for trading Celestia ($TIA):
https://crypto.com/events/tia-app-campaign
In general for any competition or sweepstakes, I usually recommend reading the T&C’s, because either it may save you from getting disqualified for some minor detail that wasn’t accounted for, or otherwise you might find a hidden secret, such as instructions how to to get rewarded for free.
But let’s dissect the $TIA competition shall we?
The qualifiers for the $TIA competition are pretty straight forward:
- The top 1,000 traders will get rewarded $10 dollars worth of $TIA
- Each trader must conduct at least $50 dollars of trades worth of $TIA
- And lastly, each trader must have a “Junior Badge,” which can be obtained once you do a cumulative total of more than $1,000 trades (must be non-stablecoin swaps):
The badges are based on your cumulative trading activity starting from January 1st, 2023, a total of 20 starting from Freshman Trader ($100 dollars worth of trades) all the way to Transcendent Trader ($100 million dollars worth of trades).
Are these competitions worth it?
In order to determine whether or not these competitions might be worthwhile are dependent on a few different factors.
Do you already have a badge?
As I mentioned before, in order to be eligible for payout you need to have at least a Junior Trader Badge, which requires you to have already traded $1000 dollars on Crypto.com since January 1st 2023. If you already have the badge (or technically $950 dollars worth of eligible trades) then you would only need to trade $50 dollars worth of $TIA to become eligible. If you don’t have any trading history on Crypto.com post January 1st 2023 (like me), then you’d have to trade a full $1000 dollars. If you haven’t traded anything to date, it makes a significant difference because you may be exposed to significant spread premiums.
Paywalls, Spreads and Fees
Regardless of whether or not there’s a competition, it’s imperative that you determine what the fees are for each platform, and also if you’re not buying them on an actual exchange orderbook (where you can set limit orders for specific prices). If there’s no orderbook, it’s important to determine what the paywall or spread is for their tokens, for companies like Crypto.com incorporate premiums on tokens if you want to do a quick buy/sell. Let’s look at Crypto.com’s “One Time Buy” function for a $1000 dollar purchase of $TIA:
In the above graphic you can see that $1000 dollars will get you approximately 66.39 $TIA. For the unaware, they might be thinking that they’re buying this at face value, but in reality, there’s most likely a a paywall. Because these spreads aren’t normally publicly advertised, it behooves the consumer to shop around for a better price, such as this one from Coinbase which was available at the exact same time:
From a quick glance you can see that the buy price of both Crypto.com and Coinbase, which at the time (12:17pm to be exact) would have netted you a difference of 2.57 $TIA, or nearly $30 dollars worth of extra $TIA. (It’s important to remember that Coinbase also has a spread if you don’t go through their orderbook).
If we do some quick math, the -2.57 difference in the number of $TIA you would receive on Crypto.com compared to an orderbook, indicates that there’s around at least a 3.7% premium that you’re essentially paying to buying $TIA on the Crypto.com app. Adding this all up, this means that if you conducted a $1000 purchase on Crypto.com, you would essentially be making a $30.70 loss on your trade(s) in order to try to earn a $10 dollar bonus from the competition.
Do you have access to Crypto.com’s orderbook exchange?
Chances are that if you’re reading this you may not have even known that there is a Crypto.com “Exchange App” where you can perform simple orderbook functions like market and limit orders. As a quick test, you can try logging in directly to their exchange site to see if you can get in: https://auth-x.crypto.com/users/sign_in
More than a hundred countries are geo-fenced (including the United States) from using the Exchange App, let alone being restricted from using the main Crypto.com app altogether. Whether or not you have access to the Exchange App makes a significant different for whether or not this deal is worth it, because otherwise there’s no way to avoid Crypto.com’s steep paywall.
But wait, what about Diamond Boxes?
Crypto.com does have a reward incentive program where you can open up different “Mystery Boxes” for every 25 diamonds earned.
In a nutshell, each box could reveal either a bronze, silver, or gold box which offers a different amount of $CRO, Crypto.com’s native token, in relation to the current price of $CRO. Currently you can earn diamonds from the following methods, as well as bonus diamonds (around 50 or so depending on the level) for earning badges:
Once again doing some quick math, if you were to spread out two $500 dollar trades over the course of 2 days in order to be eligible for the trading competition and maximize your boxes, in order to break even you’d have to win almost 400 $CRO from your 5 boxes (or 7–9 if you assume that you’ll get an extra 2 boxes per badge). The reward incentive may be better than nothing, but it’s a pretty poor value proposition when you’ll most likely only get 5–6 $CRO per box while in reality you’d near closer to at least 50.
Conclusion
From my perspective, the math simply just doesn’t add up to make any of these trading competitions worth it, and it proves yet once again, that if you’re trading on a centralized exchange, that it’s much more efficient to be trading on an orderbook system rather than not. As I mentioned before, I typically only use Crypto.com if I’m trying to get quick and easy access to tokens that aren’t listed elsewhere, but even so, paywalls and 7-day settlement periods for withdrawals, it makes Crypto.com extremely cumbersome.
All this being said, I could see people needing to use Crypto.com if they had no other options, but due to the many geo-restrictions that they already have, I’d argue that other exchanges (albeit smaller) such as Biofin or Pionex are still better options.
Disagree with my take on Crypto.com? Or have you participated in one of Crypto.com’s competitions before and made it big? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
