Rob W.

This review is for the digital asset exchange. This is a business that proves that despite making a killing, you can still run a business pretty poorly and have a pretty poor customer satisfaction rating.

Poloniex has been plauged with scalability problems for quite some time. With the recent surge in Bitcoin/Altcoin popularity, the user base grew exponentially and the exchange was woefully underprepared to handle the surge in demand. As a result, customers were unable to upgrade to higher tier verification levels, significantly hampering their withdrawal levels, and thus making a lot of customer unhappy. Many customer reported 20-30 day waits before hearing back on their customer service requests (tickets).

The coolest thing about Poloniex was its live and vibrant "Trollbox" which allows exchange users to chat with each other in a dynamic and public environment. However the public chat was overwhelmed with repeated customer service requests and complaints, and just as recently as yesterday the Trollbox was shutdown indefinitely to fold the moderators over to the much needed customer support.

The exchange also does not let you deposit or withdraw fiat currency. You must used an intermediary like Tether, or transfer funds using cryptocurrency. Thus you eat the conversion cost in some way. I suppose the benefit is getting around the stricter portion of U. S AML laws, since no fiat money is supported.

Coinbase is the gold standard in virtual currency exchangers, exclusively dealing with Bitcoin, Ethereum and recently Litecoin. They are a fast growing darling of Silicon Valley and have the heavyweight VC's like Andreesen Horowitz / DFJ backing their later stage rounds. While they're busy burning through millions of cash, they still have not figured out how to sufficiently scale and manage their customer base.

The platform works nearly flawlessly once it has been set up properly. However, I found this process to be quite cumbersome, because of the automation that goes into the process and the severely lacking human capital for customer support.

Something as simple as updating a social security number was quite painful, with repeated error messages. Contacting customer support yielded 1 response out of 4 attempts, in a 1 month period. That response simply stated something to the effect of "sorry it took us so long to respond, are you still experiencing this problem? Please try again."

The problem eventually resolved on its own, mysteriously, only to come back up again (and restrict my account) in the process. When it works the exchange occurs very quickly, and the funds can be deposited within 2 business days to an account. They can process a high volume and a large dollar amount of transactions. There's a maximum sell limit that replenishes in real time. The exchange fees are quite high, but there's a problem with an oversupply of ledger recordings and the higher fees tend to get processed faster.