BTCpop.co Review 2019 – Strenghts and Weaknesses of BTCpop

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BTCPop is an online lending platform, which also comes with an altcoin exchange, a shares market and that supports IPOs, bond funding and trading. The company was founded in December, 2014 by Lee Bartholomew and registered in the United Kingdom.

The site experienced early success but it soon reached to an end as serious flaws in the backend started popping up and the platform was compromised. Users began to migrate from the site and the original owner sold the enterprise.

After a process of restructuration, which included moving the physical offices of the company to Majuro in the Marshall Islands and registering it there (under Reg. 86899), the platform came back up.

Using the platform: signing up

The registration form does not request too much information but the overall process is slightly tedious due to the security measures implemented by BTCPop. First you have to fill your name, email and password; a confirmation email will be sent which you have to click. Then, you will receive a second link to whitelist your current IP address, which takes a few minutes to arrive.

Using the platform: getting verified

Lender can opt to stay anonymous if they want, but borrowers in general will need to pass a verification process before being able to post loan requests.

Mandatory verification involves submitting a national ID or driver’s license and a proof of residence (usually in the form of a utility bill). An additional step not required but recommended is uploading a selfie, as it sensibly increases the credibility of the profile. The whole verification is carried out through the Ardeva Verification Services.

Using the platform: lending

The platform supports seven types of loans, six of which are available only to verified borrowers. Reputation building loans are quite common on the site and not frowned upon as the social component of the site more or less encourages them.

Lenders can expect a 10+% ARP, with the exact amount depending on the borrower and his stats. On the site’s blog there are some suggested ARPs for the first loan based on the available amount of collateral.

Investing on the site is a simple and direct process; lenders first need to open the loan listings and browse the available requests. The system assigns a rating to each user and does its best to spot potential scammers, but manual filtering must be made by the investor.

Listed loan requests: we already found a rep. building loan

If the overview of any of the loans particularly interests the investor, he proceeds to click on the title and review the posting more in detail. The page of the request includes a summary of the profile of the borrower, the terms of the loan, statistics about the funding and a box detailing if collaterals or insurance are available.

Browsing a particular loan: would you take the risk of putting money into this rep. building?

If the terms sound realistic and match his, the user has the chance of becoming a lender by entering the amount he wants to put into the loan (under the “Invest” box) and clicking on “invest”.

The site also offers the option of negotiating pending payments, trading them openly in a market as any other asset. History of transactions is kept by at least two months, and it can be exported and downloaded in case the user wants to access that data later.

Trading loans on the notes marketplace

Finally, users can take a more conservative approach and put their BTC in an investment fund (the one used to process instant loans) where risk and profit are shared among the investors. If the risk is still too high, there is a final option: opening a savings account that yields 5% ARP. Both, investment and savings accounts, can be found in the account page.

P2P lending is too risky for you? No problem, you have investment and savings accounts

Using the site: borrowing

Loans fall in one of seven categories depending on whether they have a collateral attached, how are they funded and the destination that will be given to the money.

Custom personal loans are the first kind and are characterized by letting the user set his own terms (interest rate and duration). If they come with a collateral, they belong to a second category.

After a couple of repaid “standard” loans (normally, more than 2 BTC repaid over at least 2 loans), users are given the option to receive instant ones. These are funded from the investment pool, but the user still has control over the terms.

The fourth are custom business loans, similar to the first category but thought to finance a business activity.

Types five and six are IPOs and bonds, respectively. Both are meant for businesses to gather funds and represent an obligation to pay dividends periodically, but differ in the level of autonomy given to shareholders to sell back or not their shares. Bonds obligate the company to rebuy them at any point (and holders to sell), while IPOs require a common agreement between the parts to trade shares back.

The last ones, the ones that do not require verification, are instant collateral loans, where users have less control over the terms and which only accept a subset of the traded altcoins and shares as collateral.

Borrowers are charged a 1~4% fee (+1%insurance, if applied) deducted right after being lent the requested Bitcoin. All loans are issued and repaid in BTC, with no exception. The available runtimes are 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180 or 270 days or; 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years.

To borrow some BTC, click the “Apply” option under the “loans” section and then select the type of loan you want to take.

It seems I can take no loans, seems correct since I am just a brand new user

After choosing the desired format, a second screen will show a form to be filled with the terms of the loan. For collateral loans the user has to manually select from his assets and add anything he wants to offer.

Instant collateral loans: the only loans available to unverified users. But, the catch is that you need to freeze a valid collateral to take one.

BTCPop on the media

The platform is mentioned in Bitcoin media, in different contexts. The most recent reference to BTCPop came from CoinTelegraph regarding the lost of customer’s funds from Arbx (which used BTCPop as a banking solution) due to a “technological issue”.

The site has a neutral 68% trust score on Scam Adviser, where people are warned about the website being based on the USA, but hiding its real location.

Reviews on Trustpilot are predominantly positive with an average score of 8.2/10 based on six reviews, all posted within a month. All reviewers are also first-timers, and no new reviews have been posted since then (a couple of months already), fact that raises even more suspicion about those being bought. We got in touch with BTCPop, and they stated on the issue that once one of their customers posted the link on the chat which motivated other people present at the moment to review them.

Conclusion

BTCPop has some interesting features, including that a complete unknown cannot request a loan unlike in other platforms, but it is also a propitious place for scammers to build trust and perform their exit theft.

The platform has had problems in the past, which even lead to a change of ownership. Neutral trust scores and possibly paid reviews are not exactly encouraging.

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