StormGain Review – Is This Cryptocurrency Platform Legit?

About StormGain

StormGain is an all-in-one crypto platform allowing users to buy, store, trade, learn, earn, and even mine crypto. While their services are not technically available to US residents, users can use a VPN to create and access their account. Unlike most brokers that differ mostly in name, there are a fair amount of unique services StormGain provides worth keeping in mind that I will discuss in more detail below.

StormGain Account Opening

Opening an account with StormGain is very easy and only requires an email and phone verification. Once that verification is complete, you will be able to deposit any crypto assets and begin trading. To purchase crypto with fiat (credit/debit card), however, you will have to go through basic KYC verification, including name, date of birth, address, nationality, and proof of ID.

Platform Interface

Though StormGain’s interface is fairly simple to navigate, there isn’t an obvious homepage once you sign in, which could be confusing to some. That said, all their services are neatly laid out in the top left corner, and the account value, wallet, and deposit function are easily seen and accessible via the top right corner. The trading and exchange interfaces are also very straightforward and should be no problem at all for anyone mildly familiar with the process.

Mobile App

StormGain’s mobile app is very well designed and user-friendly and offers all the same capabilities as the desktop version. The app is not currently available for US residents, but for anyone outside the states, I would highly recommend the app as it really is convenient and easy to use.

StormGain Exchange

StormGain’s Exchange allows users to exchange stablecoins such as USDT and USDC with a number of assets and also allows a few crypto-to-crypto exchanges, including but not limited to BTC to BCH, BTC to LTC, and ETH to BTC. If you are exchanging USDT, you can choose from twelve crypto assets, eight of which are actual cryptos, while the remaining four are either stablecoins or gold/silver backed cryptos. Users exchanging with USDC will have fewer options to choose from than with UDST, but can still exchange for BTC, ETH, DAI, and USDT.

Spot Trading

As for trading, StormGain supports a respectable 34 trading pairs with up to 300x leverage. If you are interested in altcoins, you likely won’t find what you are looking for, but most of the major coins are supported. However, it should be noted that they do not have a ETH/USDT pair. If you want to trade ETH, you will have to do ETH/BTC.

It’s also worth mentioning that their supported pairs are not conveniently listed for users to sift through, rather they can only be found via search. This isn’t a huge problem, but a list would certainly be nice. As for the actual spot trading experience, StormGain’s interface is pretty standard and shouldn’t pose any difficulties.

Derivatives

StormGain offers over 50 futures instruments with varying degrees of leverage. More speculative assets will cap the leverage at 15-30x, but as you move up the list to “safer” assets, that leverage will increase to 50x for middle range assets like LINK and DOGE, 100x for top range assets like ADA and XRP, 200x for ETH, and 300x for BTC.

StormGain also offers one options instrument for BTC where users can choose various strikes and expirations if they wish to seek a leveraged BTC position outside of futures.

The last derivative instruments StormGain provides is commodities trading of XAUt (Gold) and XAGt (Silver) with up to 200x leverage. This may not be what most crypto traders are interested in, but it is still nice to have the option to trade commodities.

Indices

In addition to derivatives and spot trading, StormGain allows users to invest in three different crypto indices. Each one contains a different basket of crypto assets, allowing easy exposure to multiple assets someone may be interested in investing in. The first index contains BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC, and BCH; the second index contains just BTC, ETH, and XRP; and the third index contains BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC, BCH, DASH, EOS, ADA, XMR, and BSV.

Mining

An incredibly unique service StormGain offers is the ability to participate in Bitcoin cloud mining. Unlike traditional CPU-intensive mining that runs through your computer(s), StormGain’s cloud mining is run on their own equipment and simply allows you to benefit. Mining intervals last four hours, and funds cannot be withdrawn until the four hours is up, and you have mined at least 10USDT. A small caveat to the service, however, is mined coins can only be used for trading, though any profits made from those trades can be withdrawn. In essence, the cloud mining is a clever way to encourage trading on their platform, but it is still a very unique service that affords users the opportunity to trade with free bitcoin.

Weekly Digest

A very useful resource StormGain offers not often found on crypto trading platforms is their Weekly Digest. Here you will find very helpful information and pictures discussing recent news, on-chain metrics, price action, and much more for each week. Within the weekly digest they will even share data and images taken from Glassnode (one of the leading on-chain metric platforms). There isn’t always a huge amount of information available, but it is an excellent resource to stay up to date on the biggest news and technical indicators for the week.

StormGain Fees & Minimums

StormGain’s fee structure is very unique in that it offers 0% commission trading. Rather than charging traders a maker or taker fee for every trade, they only charge traders on their profitable trades. This may sound appealing, especially if you are a struggling trader, but a 10% profit sharing rate will seem quite high to most. For example, a winning trade of $1000 would translate to a $100 profit sharing fee, which only becomes more egregious with higher value trades.

If you are just exchanging crypto, StormGain charges various fees for each respective pair you are exchanging. Examples are .10% for USDT to BTC and ETH, .25% for USDT to USDC, .25% for ETH to BTC, and .095% for BTC to USDT.

While there is no fee for depositing crypto assets, there is 0.1% fee for withdrawing funds to an external wallet. Examples of deposit minimums are 1 USDT, 0.0002 BTC, 0.01 ETH, and 7 XRP. Examples of withdrawal minimums are 50 USDT, 0.0059 BTC, 0.3 ETH, and 240 XRP. 

If you are just looking to buy crypto with fiat via a credit/debit card, you will pay a 3.5% fee, which is a fairly standard rate these days. However, StormGain says there is a 5% deposit commission, so hard to pin down which is the real cost or if users are charged both. There is also a $50 minimum and $20,000 maximum deposit when using credit or debit.

StormGain Security

Truthfully there isn’t much information StormGain details about security. They do allow users to activate 2 factor authentication, but there just isn’t a lot of clarity around how they store funds, insurance, or really anything else related to security. This is not to say the platform isn’t secure, but it certainly raises questions.

Customer Support

StormGain has a very robust and well-organized help and support center that should assist users with most problems or questions they will face. I encourage anyone new to their platform to search around their help center as it really is a great resource. If, however, the help center isn’t enough for you, you can always email support directly. StormGain also provides live support, but due to its rapid growth, that is only available to clients with funded accounts.

Another very helpful support tool StormGain offers is their Video Education. Help centers can be very useful, but sometimes reading how something is done just doesn’t cut it, so their large database of video walkthroughs and explanations of their services (and crypto more generally) will be an incredible resource for anyone getting started with their platform.

Special Offers

StormGain offers a notable referral program allowing you to collect 15% of all brokerage fees any of your referred friends pay. Any referred friends will also receive 3 USDT.

StormGain offers an additional referral program for their cloud mining. Much like the offer above, they will give you 15% of mined funds any of your referrals withdraw and give 3USDT to those referrals as well.

To encourage more active trading, StormGain runs a loyalty program with different tiers depending on your trading volume for a given month. As you move up the ranks, you can earn a certain percentage of deposits back for trading, earn interest on funds held in your wallet, lower exchange commissions, and even get improved mining speeds.

Conclusion: StormGain

Though StormGain is a very respectable crypto broker, it seems more apt for beginner traders as the people with a large number of losing trades are most likely to benefit from their fee structure. If you are a consistently profitable trader, however, forking over 10% of your profits will not make their services very appealing. That said, there are still a lot of unique services that make StormGain worth considering, namely, their indices and commodities trading and their cloud mining, which you will be hard-pressed to find on other crypto platforms. They also have a wealth of learning information and resources, which is, again, a testament to their platform being suited for new traders. They are a little lacking in the trading pairs they support, but they do have a fairly extensive derivatives market so I would just focus on what specifically you want to trade and see if they offer it. Overall, I think StormGain is a very organized, easy-to-use platform that is best suited for new traders looking to learn and save on fees as they mow through their mostly unprofitable beginning stages of trading.