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Buying crypto directly: every route, priced honestly
The four ways to buy crypto without a fund wrapper — exchanges, P2P, OTC desks and broker-integrated crypto — compared on fees, minimums, custody and what licensing actually protects.
Every crypto ETF on this site exists to solve one problem: buying and holding crypto used to be awkward. It is worth asking how true that still is. A regulated exchange onboards you in an afternoon, prices a $50 order at a fraction of a percent, runs on Saturday night, and hands you an asset you can move to hardware you own. No fund does the last two things at all.
This page maps the direct routes and prices them against each other and against the fund wrapper. It is not an argument that ETFs are pointless — for retirement accounts and for people who never want to think about a seed phrase, they are excellent. It is an argument that you should know what you are paying for.
The four routes, at a glance
| Route | Best for | Typical cost | Speed | Custody | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Centralised exchange | Almost everyone, any size from $10 up | 0.1–1.5% per trade, tighter at volume | Minutes once verified | Yours to withdraw, or leave with the exchange | 24/7 including weekends |
| Peer-to-peer marketplace | Local payment methods, cash, regions with thin banking rails | Often 0% platform fee, but a price premium of 1–8% | Minutes to hours per trade | Direct to your wallet via escrow release | 24/7, counterparty dependent |
| OTC desk / RFQ | Block trades, typically $100,000 and up | Built into the quoted spread | Same day, negotiated | Settled to your wallet or custodian | Desk hours, often extended |
| Broker-integrated crypto | People who want coins and stocks on one statement | Spread-based, usually wider than an exchange | Instant inside the app | Often no withdrawal — check first | Varies by broker |
Cost ranges are typical published figures across major venues and move with volume tier, payment method and market conditions. Always check the fee schedule of the specific venue.
Centralised exchanges: the default, for good reasons
An exchange runs a matching engine and an order book, the same way Nasdaq does. You deposit fiat, place a bid, and when it crosses with someone's ask you own the coin. The mechanics are familiar to anyone who has traded a stock, and the fee structure is usually more transparent than a fund's.
Two features matter and are widely misunderstood. The first is the maker-taker distinction. A taker order removes liquidity from the book and pays a higher fee — often 0.1% to 0.5%. A maker order adds liquidity by sitting on the book waiting, and frequently pays zero to 0.2%. Placing a limit order slightly below the current ask instead of hitting market can halve your cost, and it is the single easiest saving available.
The second is withdrawal. The point of buying on an exchange rather than through a fund is that you can move the asset. Before you deposit anything meaningful, confirm the venue supports on-chain withdrawal for the asset you want, and check the network fee. A venue that will sell you bitcoin but not let you withdraw it is offering you an expensive ETF with worse tax paperwork.
Full detail on how to compare venues — licensing, fee tiers, proof of reserves, insurance claims — is in crypto exchanges compared, and the step-by-step first purchase is in how to buy Bitcoin.
Peer-to-peer: useful where banking rails are thin
A P2P marketplace does not match orders — it matches people. A seller posts a price and accepted payment methods; you take the offer; the platform locks the seller's crypto in escrow while you send payment directly to them; escrow releases on confirmation.
The platform fee is often zero, which is how P2P gets marketed as free. It is not. The cost lives in the price premium: sellers quote above the global spot rate to compensate for chargeback risk and payment friction. Premiums of 1% to 8% are common, and the wider ones are on the payment methods that are easiest to reverse. On any fee-comparison basis, that is far more expensive than an exchange order.
OTC desks: for trades the order book cannot absorb
Above a certain size, showing your order to the public market moves the price against you. An OTC desk solves that by quoting you a single price for the whole block, filling it from its own inventory and its network, then settling bilaterally.
Industry convention puts the standard minimum around $100,000, though the range is wide: some desks engage from $50,000, several institutional desks decline meetings below $1 million, and a newer "retail OTC" tier has appeared with thresholds in the $10,000 to $50,000 band. You do not pay a commission — the desk's margin is inside the quote, which is why you should always request quotes from more than one desk and compare against the visible mid-price.
Retail and institutional OTC differ more than the shared name suggests, and settlement risk is the main thing to understand before wiring money. That whole subject is in crypto OTC desks.
Start with a licensed venue
Regulatory registration is not a guarantee against loss, but it does mean audited AML controls, licensed money transmission and a supervisor to complain to. CEX.IO is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, holds money transmitter licences across US states under NMLS ID 1804170, and is authorised by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission as a DLT provider.
Broker-integrated crypto: convenient, usually costlier
Several brokerages now sell crypto alongside stocks. Fidelity Crypto offers bitcoin and ether. Robinhood has traded crypto for years. Charles Schwab announced direct bitcoin and ether trading in April 2026, and Morgan Stanley planned a retail crypto rollout on E*TRADE during the first half of 2026. Interactive Brokers offers crypto through a partner.
The appeal is a single login and a single tax statement. The cost is usually a wider spread than a dedicated exchange, a shorter asset list, and in some cases no on-chain withdrawal at all — at which point you have bought something closer to an ETF than to bitcoin. Read the withdrawal policy before you decide this route counts as owning the asset.
Comparing the real cost, wrapper included
| Method | To buy | To hold | To sell | Do you own the asset? | Trading hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spot Bitcoin ETF | ~0.02–0.20% spread | 0.14–1.50% a year | Same spread again | No — a claim on bitcoin | US market hours |
| Exchange, taker order | ~0.1–0.5% fee + spread | $0 if self-custodied | Same fee again | Yes, withdrawable | 24/7 |
| Exchange, maker order | Often 0–0.2% | $0 if self-custodied | Often 0–0.2% | Yes | 24/7 |
| P2P marketplace | 1–8% price premium | $0 | Premium works against you | Yes | 24/7 |
| OTC block trade | Spread, often under 0.1% at size | $0 or custodian fee | Negotiated | Yes | Desk hours |
Illustrative ranges for comparison, not quotes. ETF spread and fee figures are from issuer disclosures and published spread data; exchange figures are typical published fee schedules.
The row that surprises people is the second one. A maker order on an exchange, self-custodied, has no ongoing cost at all. Ten years in a 0.25% fund costs roughly 2.5% of the position in fees; ten years in a hardware wallet costs the price of the device. That gap is the honest case for direct ownership, and it is why we think the "ETFs made self-custody obsolete" line is wrong.
What the table cannot show is the cost of getting self-custody wrong. There is no password reset. Lose the recovery phrase and the asset is unrecoverable — a failure mode a brokerage account simply does not have.
What licensing actually protects
In the US, a crypto exchange is a money transmitter. That triggers registration with FinCEN as a money services business, a written AML programme with internal controls, a designated compliance officer, employee training and independent testing, a customer identification programme, suspicious activity reporting, and compliance with the Travel Rule for transmittals at or above $3,000. Most also need state money transmitter licences on top.
Be clear about what this does and does not do. It means the venue is supervised, its controls are tested and there is a regulator to escalate to. It does not insure you against a fall in the price of bitcoin, and crypto held at an exchange is not FDIC- or SIPC-protected against market loss. The regulatory map is in crypto ETF regulation.
Custody is the decision behind the decision
Strip everything else away and the ETF-versus-direct question is a custody question. In a fund, a qualified custodian holds the keys and a brokerage holds your shares. Direct, you choose: leave it with the exchange, or take the keys yourself.
A workable middle path, and the one we see used most often by people who have thought about it: keep a trading balance on a licensed exchange for the amounts you actively move, hold long-term savings in self-custody on hardware, and use a fund only inside retirement accounts where the tax advantage is worth the annual fee. That uses each wrapper for the thing it is genuinely best at.
Our take from the desk
The fee comparison is not close for long horizons, and yet we still put ETF shares in IRAs without hesitating. A 0.15% annual fee is a rational price for never having to think about key management inside a tax-advantaged account you will not touch for twenty years. In a taxable account, where you could self-custody for free and control your own realisation timing, paying the same fee is much harder to justify.