Simplex is a new way of getting Hive with fiat money using a credit or debit card. In this post, I'll share my first experience with it.
Buying HIVE with fiat money may be a troublesome task for those new to crypto and the Hive blockchain. It can be even worse for people who live in countries where the biggest and most famous exchanges are blocked.
Because of that, I'm always glad to find out new ways to use fiat money to get crypto and especially HIVE. Simplex is probably the latest addition to the channels one can use to buy HIVE with fiat money. I've been willing to try it out ever since their announcement that HIVE became available to purchase on the platform, but I kept postponing it due to time constraints.
I finally got around to doing it, and I thought I'd share my experience here on LeoFinance.
Buying Hive with fiat money on Simplex
The Simplex homepage is very clean-looking and pretty straightforward. It didn't take much to find the "Buy Crypto" button on the top of the screen.
After clicking that button and then confirming I'm not a robot through a quick captcha verification, I was finally at the stage of selecting which crypto I wanted to buy and which fiat money I'd buy it with. Here is where I met the first "bump" on the road.
I planned to do a test run first with a small amount just to make sure everything worked as intended, but I found out that the minimum I could do was 256.86 BRL (Brazilian Real). That's exactly 50 USD, so that is the minimum amount you can buy on this platform. I checked later and confirmed that the minimum order amount is 50 USD. I also found out that they charge a fee ranging from 3.5% to 5% and a minimum of 10 USD. Ouch! Buying a small amount as I'm doing is definitely not ideal here.
Well, no big deal; I decided I'd just trust that everything would work out fine. Losing any amount of money sucks, but if this went south, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Moving on.
After I filled in with my debit card data and some personal information, a verification code was sent to my email, and it arrived instantly. I filled in the code on the website and advanced to the payment verification stage of the process.
Once I confirmed the purchase, a timer appeared on my screen, along with instructions telling me to open my credit card app on my phone and approve the transaction there. As soon as I opened the app, I was prompted with an approval request, and as soon as I tapped to approve it, the website responded and showed me a confirmation screen.
I don't know if that approval thing is standard procedure or specific to my bank, but it was very smooth and quick, so no complaint from me!
Okay, so the deed is done, but one question remains: did it work?!
As soon as I got the "payment received" screen, I rushed to my Hive wallet praying that I'd find my newly purchased tokens, and to my great relief, they were already there! I was hoping it would be fast, but I didn't know it would be that fast! The transaction was almost instantaneous, so I had to spend no time at all hitting F5 and praying that my HIVE would show up.
As you can see, I got 32.99 HIVE out of the 33.33 that I bought, which means a transaction fee of 0.01%. Not bad at all!
Final Thoughts
I hadn't heard of Simplex before, but they belong to Nuvei, a big payment company in Canada that I do know. Everything about it looks legit, and my first purchase with them was very smooth and quick.
The 50 USD minimum order can be an issue because while it may not be a lot of money to most, that's not true for everyone. In Brazil, for example, that's roughly 20% of the minimum wage, so I can see it being a deal-breaker to some people.
The fees are also a bit high to my taste, and it probably won't be my go-to option for the moment, but I can see people adopting Simplex simply because it's straightforward and quick to use.
All in all, it's yet another viable way for people to go from fiat to crypto and especially Hive, so I welcome Simplex and hope it helps to spread crypto adoption all over the world.