Streamline Your Crypto Purchases: A Guide to Buying Cryptocurrency without Jumping Between Multiple Platforms
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Sometimes the Hardest Part of Buying Cryptocurrency
Sometimes the hardest part of buying cryptocurrency isn’t deciding which coin to purchase, but how to purchase it in the first place. Despite mainstream adoption of crypto, the buying process can still be confusing due to the wide variety of platforms, technical jargon and outright scams making it difficult to know which options are safe.
The Simplest Way to Buy Crypto Today
For most people, the easiest approach to buying crypto is to use an all-in-one platform that lets you deposit money, purchase crypto and store it in the same place. These platforms typically fall into one of three categories: payment apps, brokerages and centralized crypto exchanges.
Payment apps are primarily designed for sending money or making everyday transactions, but a few of them also let you buy crypto. You can usually purchase crypto in just a few minutes using a linked debit card or bank account. The trade-off is that these apps support a limited number of digital assets and tend to charge higher fees.
Brokerages like SoFi include crypto alongside traditional assets, offering them as part of a broader investment strategy. If you already use one of these platforms to trade stocks or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), adding crypto can be a fairly seamless experience. But while this approach simplifies tracking your investments, brokerages — like payment apps — tend to limit what you can do with digital assets to buying and selling. For example, they typically don’t support crypto-to-crypto trades or staking.
On both payment apps and brokerages, transferring your crypto off the platform and into an external wallet is often difficult or even restricted. That means you may have less flexibility if you want to experiment with active trading or decentralized finance in the future.
Centralized exchanges offer the most complete crypto experience within a single platform. These platforms are designed for buying, selling and holding digital assets, so they tend to support a wider range of coins and features, like staking and lending. Many of them also have a simple onboarding process and an intuitive interface to appeal to beginners.
Compared with payment or brokerage apps, centralized crypto exchanges can be slightly more complex, but often provide greater control over your assets and lower fees in return.
The Pros and Cons of Using a Single Crypto Platform
Using a single platform streamlines the process of buying cryptocurrency because you don’t have to transfer funds between services, manage multiple accounts or navigate unfamiliar tools. For beginners, that can make a meaningful difference.
The biggest trade-off is that when you keep your crypto on a single platform, you’re trusting a third party to safeguard your assets. This is known as custodial risk, and it’s why many serious crypto investors eventually get a wallet of their own.
When you buy crypto on an exchange or trading app, the platform keeps it in a wallet it oversees. This means it has control over your private keys (the alphanumeric code that locates your assets on the blockchain).
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