Review contents
Probably the safest place to buy and store your crypto. It’s an established exchange (buy and sell crypto) that focuses on looking after your crypto safely. It’s super easy to use, and great for both beginners and advanced traders. A solid 4 stars from us.
Gemini is one of the most established crypto exchanges, it started way back in 2014 (that’s old for crypto!), and is one of the leading exchanges in the world. Others have come and gone but Gemini has grown and grown. So it must be doing something right.
Crypto can feel like the wild-west sometimes. Gemini understand this. Their ethos is trust and security. They focus on making sure everything is legal and approved by authorities across the world so customers can feel confident and trust their money and crypto is safe.
It’s super simple to use too, perfect for beginners, and advanced features for traders. It caters for pretty much everyone!
You can use Gemini on your phone, with a 5 star rated app on both Apple and Android, and use their website too.
Let’s dive into Gemini in a bit more detail and see if it’s right for you.
Yep! Gemini is great for beginners, it’s easy to get started and use the platform. There’s no complicated charts that you have to navigate through to get going – but if you want you can use them once you’ve become a bit more familiar with crypto and trading.
There’s also a great resource centre to help get you started and learn the basics of crypto (with videos too). It’s called Crytopedia.
If you want advanced trading features, Gemini has got a great platform for you, called ActiveTrader.
It’s got everything you need to make the most of your trading (and hopefully make more money!). It’s got advanced charts for technical analysis (analysis based on the trading market history), and order book data (where you can see current orders from other traders). Plus, much more order types, such as limit orders and stop-loss orders (where you set a price you want to buy or sell at).
Whether you’re a beginner or advanced trader, the range of coins to trade is pretty good, there’s 52 overall, but many more crypto specific trading pairs, such as trading with bitcoin rather than pounds or dollars (e.g. buying ethereum with bitcoin).
The coins listed are established coins, and new coins are reviewed before being listed. They’re the more popular ones, such as bitcoin and ethereum, but you’ll also find newer coins like ApeCoin. As long as the project can be verified as legitimate, it can be added.
Note: the advanced platform has more coins and pairs to trade than the basic platform, so check there if you’re looking for a specific one.
Gemini aren’t just an exchange, they can also hold onto your crypto long-term too, so it’s all safe and secure within their physical and virtual vaults. You don’t have to worry about protecting your crypto yourself (which can be a pain).
They’re the industry leader in crypto custody, which simply means they are the best for looking after your coins, so you don’t have to.
It’s more suited to companies and organisations with lots of crypto who want to keep it super safe. So, we won’t go into it much here, but you can be sure that if large companies are trusting Gemini with their crypto, you can too.
Gemini also has an NFT marketplace too (Non-Fungible Tokens, such as the famous Bored Apes), called Nifty Gateway. It’s popular and easy to use, so if you’re into your JPEGs, it’s worth checking out (we know they’re much more than JPEGs really!).
Being run by Gemini adds that extra reassurance that it’s all nice and secure, and you can trade safely.
It’s not the cheapest out there, but you are getting super-tight security and compliance with government regulations. It’s also a similar price to other popular exchanges such as Coinbase.
All exchanges charge fees when you buy and sell on their platforms, and not just in crypto, with any currency exchange, such as changing your Pounds to Euros when you go on holiday. It can sometimes feel like a lot of cash if you trade regularly, but it’s unavoidable.
With Gemini’s regular account, where you have your wallet (a place to store your crypto) and basic exchange (so not ActiveTrader), you’ll be charged a convenience fee and a transaction fee when you buy or sell crypto.
First up, the transaction fee, here’s what you’ll pay:
For small purchases it’s pretty high, and for purchases above £150, it’s 1.49% which is still pretty high. These high fees are common with the big exchanges, as you’re paying for trust, simplicity and ease.
For the convenience fee it gets a bit more complicated, you won’t actually see this fee, it’s included in the price of the coin when you buy or sell, and it’s sometimes called a spread fee. Effectively, the cost of your coin is increased by 0.5% when you buy, or reduced by 0.5% when you sell.
If you’re trading regularly, you’ll be using ActiveTrader. Which is cheaper than the regular account.
The fees are a percentage of what you’re buying and selling, and are called taker or maker fees. A taker fee is charged if you buy the crypto at the current market price (you are taking the crypto/money out of the market).
Maker fees are charged when you specify a price you want to buy the coin at (called a limit order). You are adding money to the market, and therefore it benefits the exchange and you get cheaper fees.
The actual fee depends on your trading volume too, based on the last 30 days. Here’s what you’ll be paying:
If you’re trading over $1,000,000 per month, the fees keep scaling down until you reach $100,000,000, at which point the maker fee is 0%. We can all dream right?!
There’s also a 0.01% auction fee for every transaction you make.
These fees aren’t bad actually, it’s cheaper than the other popular crypto exchange Coinbase, and their advanced exchange Coinbase Pro, where fees start at 0.60%. But Gemini is still more expensive than some platforms, such as Kraken, where fees start at 0.26%. You could say it’s middle-of-the-road.
Yep. As far as crypto exchanges go, you can’t get much safer.
They’re regularly reviewed by security firms to make sure the platform is the safest it can be. They keep the keys to the exchanges crypto wallets in high-security data centres, which employees cannot routinely access. It’s even more secure than money in the bank!
They also work with regulators across the world to make sure business operations are in-line with laws and regulations, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK.
And in the UK, if you hold cash in your account, your money is stored in a completely separate bank account to any Gemini business accounts. So if Gemini went bankrupt (very unlikely considering how popular they are worldwide), you would get your money back.
They’re also insured too. So if anything should happen to Gemini and the crypto storage, you should get your money back (if you’re using Gemini Custody). Which is very unlikely anyway due to the extensive security systems in place.
You might have heard cryptocurrencies are super bad for the environment, we won’t get into that debate here. Well, that aside, Gemini offset their use of the Bitcoin Network by removing the amount of carbon used from the atmosphere, in partnership with Climate Vault. Pretty cool.
Gemini is actually owned and run by the twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – the same people who started Facebook, well, kind of. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, didn’t treat them too well in the early days. Anyway, it’s a great story, and a good film too, called The Social Network.
The customer service is pretty good.
There’s a huge support centre which covers pretty much everything you’d ever want to ask, and you can ask a question if you need help for something specific to you.
There’s no phone line unfortunately, so you can’t speak to anyone directly over the phone, but there is a live-chat where you can chat to a customer support agent online. Most of the support is handled over email, with super quick responses.
And just like the crypto markets – it’s all 24/7.
The mobile app is rated 4.8/5 in the Apple Store and 4.4/5 in the Google Play store. Great ratings.
Unfortunately on the popular reviews website, Trustpilot, they have a score of just 1.1 out of 5, which is super low. However, not everything is as it seems…
They have hundreds of fake or unwarranted 1 star reviews which has brought their score right down, and effectively made the score unreliable.
If we look at UK specific reviews on Trustpilot, there’s a lot of 5 star reviews, mentioning the great trading and platform experience and awesome customer service. And we can vouch for that too.
We like Gemini. Its focus on safety and security is exactly what a crypto exchange should be focused on. It’s been around long enough to have proved its trustworthiness and reliability. Your money and crypto is in safe hands.
The phone apps and website are great, everything is super clear and it’s easy to trade (buy and sell) too.
The customer service is also very good, with everything you’d expect from a company handling customers' money; quick to respond and 24/7.
The tools for advanced traders are pretty good – everything you’ll need, and fees for advanced trading are in-line with most other crypto exchanges, but not the cheapest out there.
It’s slightly on the expensive side to buy crypto within your regular account, rather than on the advanced exchange. And for that reason we’re knocking it down a star, as most beginners will start here. But it’s not a deal-breaker, the safety and security makes up for it.
And as a little bonus, they’re green too, and offset the environmental impact of their bitcoin transactions.
So overall, it’s a solid 4 stars from us.
If you’re interested in signing up or learning more, visit the Gemini website to get started. Still not sure? Check out our best crypto exchanges (UK) page.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
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