My Blockfi Review | Earn up to 8.6% interests on your Crypto
Review from a (mostly) long term holder. I wanted to take advantage of earning some passive income, so I created an account and deposited BTC. Of course doing some due diligence first, I felt reasonably confident that my funds would be in good hands from theft due to their use of Gemini custody. They also support whitelisting of withdrawal addresses, 2FA, etc.
A month later, as expected I received the 6 percent interest on my BTC balance. Good! Now that they offered USDC I thought I might move some more funds in and take advantage of that 8 percent interest. But first I wanted to try a withdrawal and see what to expect in the future. I withdrew some BTC and it was flagged for manual review, which I expected. I provided the additional verification, and made a mistake so there was some follow up from their team to resolve that and the withdrawal was processed almost immediately after that.
It does seem that they are very available to customer support which is impressive and reassuring, given my past experience with other crypto exchanges that can sometimes take weeks, months, or never to respond to you when there is a problem or question. Granted, the market is not in a mania phase so this is easier to do and I hope they continue to prioritize that level of service as they scale up with more users.
I could see BlockFi being just as prominent as Coinbase when it comes to a platform that you would recommend to a complete beginner to get started with BTC, and even better that you earn interest on your holdings.
Some additional feedback:
- I didn’t try the loan product yet. I understand the interest rate can vary among many factors, but I found that I am unable to get anywhere near the 4.5% interest rate advertised on their website. More like 11%, and I have tried entering varying large and small amounts in their loan calculator to see how it changes.
- High interest rate does seem prohibitive, but when I compare it to loan terms with other services, I see a couple advantages. 1. the overcollateralized loan means you basically have locked up the funds needed to pay them back at the end of the term, which leads to 2. much lower monthly payments since you are only paying the interest rate. So given that, it seems like a fair deal.
