Review

Unfortunately the first impression wasn't very good. It took me over a month to open an account.

I assume no one likes the awkward KYC procedures when opening a new exchange account, but Bitvavo really took it to the next level. They ask for a lot of information which in my opinion was not legally required and asked repeatedly for the same documents. Also it took weeks before receiving an answer sometimes.

Bitvavo support does not have a phone number or other contact options and is only reachable by email.

When logging in you have to enter your logging details twice, you have to enter them again after you verified a new device. This probably has to do something with my cookie settings. Not a huge problem, but a little bit annoying.

The website itself is nice and professional. You can easily manage and trade your assets on the website and for more advanced trading they have a professional trading environment. The trading volume is large enough so you can trade quickly for normal market rates.

Bitvavo pays out daily staking rewards, at this moment around 0.77% for Bitcoin, which is really nice.

To transfer bitcoins from Bitvavo to your own wallet, they require you to make a movie from your full screen showing your wallet addresses. This is not only very insecure for obvious reasons, it is also not legally required anymore as pointed out by one of their colleagues

Bitvavo trading fees are lower than average and decrease for larger volumes. However the Bitcoin withdrawal fees are pretty high with around 8 euros at this moment. Also I noticed Bitvavo payed a bitcoin transaction fee of 63 times the market rate, which seems to be an error in their software that could easily be fixed.

Pros

• Professional website and trading engine
• Based in Netherlands and licensed by De Nederlandse Bank (The Dutch Bank)
• Low fees
• Staking of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency
• Fair amount of trading volume

Cons

• Support is limited and unresponsive.
• Onboarding is complicated and time consuming
• No Lightning support
• Insecure address verification
• Clumsy login procedure

Conclusion

On Bitvavo you can trade Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies in a professional trading environment with a fair amount of volume for relative low fees. Also it is nice to receive staking rewards.

However because of the current problems with support, onboarding and security I would not advise this exchange at the moment, but if you are looking for a Dutch exchange and not planning to trade large amounts this exchange could be an option for you.