Buying crypto
without overpaying

The three routes, and what each costs

An exchange is the cheapest and the slowest to set up. You register, verify identity, fund the account, buy, then send. Trading fees on the major exchanges sit in the low tenths of a percent, and funding by bank transfer is usually free. The cost is time: verification can take anywhere from minutes to days.

A card purchase inside a wallet app is the fastest and the most expensive. The spread is buried in the quoted rate rather than shown as a fee, so it looks free and is not. Paying several percent over spot is normal here, and on a small deposit that can dwarf anything the casino ever takes from you.

An instant on-ramp service sits in between. Faster than an exchange, cheaper than a card widget, but the rate is still worse than an exchange's order book. Reasonable if you value the twenty minutes more than the difference.

Which coin to buy

For depositing, the answer is almost always a stablecoin — most commonly USDT or USDC. Two reasons.

The first is volatility. If you buy Bitcoin, deposit, play for an hour and cash out, your balance moved for reasons that have nothing to do with the game. Sometimes that works in your favour. It is still noise you did not ask for.

The second is that stablecoins run on several networks with wildly different transfer costs, so you have a real choice about what the transfer costs you. That is covered in networks and fees.

The exception is if you already hold something. Moving coin you own is free of the buying step entirely, and that beats every optimisation on this page.

The mistakes that actually cost money

Buying on the wrong network. USDT exists on Ethereum, Tron, Solana and others. They are not interchangeable. Buy on a network your destination does not support and you have a recovery problem instead of a deposit.

Ignoring the withdrawal fee at the buying end. Exchanges charge a flat fee to send coin out, and it varies enormously by network — sometimes by a factor of twenty for moving the identical asset. Check that number before you buy, not after.

Buying the exact deposit amount. The network fee comes out on top. Buy a little over what you plan to deposit or you will be short.

Skipping the test send. On a first transfer to any new address, send a small amount first and wait for it to land. It costs one extra network fee and removes the only irreversible mistake in the process.

How long each step takes

Almost all of the delay is at the funding stage. Once an exchange account is set up and funded, every subsequent deposit is a couple of minutes end to end.

What to do next

Pick a network before you buy, not after — the difference between the cheapest and most expensive way to move the same stablecoin is larger than most people expect. That is the next guide. Getting it back out again is covered in withdrawals.