BitBay Exchange Review

BitBay is an originally Polish fiat-crypto exchange, that was founded as far back as 2014 and managed to stay afloat through thick and thin ever since. It did not manage so without hiccups, though: in May 2018, following a decision by its local Polish bank to cease providing services to crypto-dealing companies, BitBay was forced to shut down its operations in Poland and re-open for business in Malta, under a new legal entity but with the same operating team. The user migration process was a bit ungraceful: users had to manually close their Polish accounts and re-open them on the new Maltese version of the exchange, going through the trouble of cumbersome dealings with overseas bank transfers. Eventually, this seemed to work out quite well; today, BitBay houses significant trading volumes for an exchange which seems to attract almost only Polish users: according to SimilarWeb, 87% of its traffic originates from Poland, and around 92% of the total trading volume on the exchange takes place solely on the BTC/PLN pair.

User Experience-wise, BitBay has managed to develop and deploy an easy to navigate-and-use website, quick, responsive and easy on the eyes. It houses a basic but not overwhelming amount of pages, its help center is relatively inviting and not intimidating. Overall, the average user will definitely feel at home in this trading environment.
Nevertheless, Not all is is well: When we tried to contact the exchange's Customer Support we received no response. We are doubtful the exchange genuinely cares about helping its customers if they ever encounter a problem with the platform.

Performance-wise, BitBay also doesn't fall short; its trading fees are average for the industry, its systems fully operational most of the time, it boasts cheap withdrawal fees and houses significant trading volume, although only for PLN-dealing users, and only in BTC.

BitBay offers a suite of basic features, nothing too fancy but also not too complicated - It has a mobile app, the ability to trade all assets against fiat currencies, it accepts multiple currencies as deposit - EUR, USD, PLN and GBP as of recently and its API performs very well - it has a relatively low latency (for European users), detailed documentation on the exchange's site and wide functionality.
Our main concern here is BitBay's selection of listed coins: alongside standard big names such as BTC, ETH, LTC and their counterparts, BitBay offers a strange selection of coins virtually no-one has ever heard about. To mention a curious few: Bob's Repair, KZ Cash, Neumark and Infinity Coin, and we believe there is a high probability many of these are outright scams. We have contacted BitBay to try and address this issue and will update our rating upon new findings. For now: we believe BitBay simply accepts listing fees from any project since it provides them with revenue, without going into too much due diligence if the aforementioned project is indeed legitimate. We see this as borderline malicious behavior, and consequently deducted points.

Moving on to more optimistic venues, BitBay team members are not listed on the exchange site, but they have public profiles on LinkedIn, where their career history is displayed. After assessing these, we can say we believe that the majority of the BitBay team is professional; They have been running the exchange since 2014 (in conjunction with its sister company, BitBay Pay) without any major hiccups or fishy activity - The exchange was never hacked or involved in any sort of malicious behavior. True, there exist reports online of users who are very discontent with the service they were provided (or lack thereof) and are even accusing BitBay of stealing their money - but after careful review, as we make sure to do in such matters, BitBay answers to them all and appears to genuinely try and sort out the matter. It appears most accusations come from ill-informed users which are not trained well enough in the safeguarding of their own assets, and frequently lose them as a consequence of their own actions, rather than those made by an alleged careless exchange. We do believe BitBay acts in the best interest of their users when it comes to fund security.

While on the matter, we did encounter trouble when trying to enable 2-Factor Authentication using Google Authenticator, as BitBay's system became confused and had to send us 11 different authorization codes before it could be enabled; this worries us, and we would not place our full trust on its security systems. Moreover, when trying to sign in from a different IP address, BitBay does not require separate verification, and lets you in your account happily once you provide it with the required credentials.

To conclude, while it does not display a top-level performance in every metric we surveyed, BitBay does remain home to most if not all of Poland's crypto-fiat gateway, as is evident by the tens of millions of USD-worth of trading happening on the platform daily. While they do search for extra revenue funnels such as listing coins and receiving fees from questionable sources, most of its users seem to not care (sadly), and BitBay is competing for Zloty-bearing customers, and not in the world stage of top fiat exchanges. While it seems to work for them, our standards seem a bit higher, and so to us it come out as a rather average ranked exchange.