BTCJam Review

BTCJam is one of the most popular Bitcoin peer-to-peer lending services. Learn about borrowing and investing Bitcoin through this BTCJam review.

BTCJam is one of the largest and oldest of the Bitcoin p2p lending services. Their web site claims they have lended over 38,000 BTC in total. That is significantly more than their closest competitor.

While I love BTCJam as a borrower I am not as fond of BTCJam from an investor perspective. I prefer Bit Lending Club for investing.

For Borrowers BTCJam is superior. It was much faster to get my account verified with BTCJam. Within 24 hours most of my documents were reviewed and I had a B rating. Within a few more days I had completed everything, had a couple of friends leave me reputation reviews on Facebook, closed a couple reputation loans, and had an A+ rating.

One of the best parts of BTCJam as a borrower is that you can set your own interest rates. With Bit Lending Club you are at the mercy of your investors. With BTCJam you can select the amount you are willing to pay in interest.

BTCJam’s fees are 4% on loans of less than 5 BTC. They are reduced to 1% on loans of more than 5 BTC. Bit Lending Clubs’ loan rates are the same for 5+ BTC loans but are only 2% on loans of less than 5 BTC. However, since you can set your own interest rates with BTCJam you can usually make back the extra interest by requesting a lower rate on your loan.

From an investor perspective BTCJam lacks in some ways. Their ability to search loan listings is lacking compared to Bit Lending Club. Additionally you cannot modify or delete a loan once you have invested in it. If you decide a loan is risky you can’t cancel it or reduce the amount invested. On the other hand BTCJam offers a notes marketplace.

The notes marketplace allows an investor to sell their promissory notes (the investment) to other investors. Bit Lending Club doesn’t offer any ability to sell your notes to others. If you have invested in a long term loan you are stuck with it. If a borrower is paying late, you are stuck with it. On BTCJam you could attempt to sell those notes. Maybe you sell the note at a discount to cover some of your losses. Maybe you sell out early rather than wait until the investment has fully matured. This can be a big advantage to some investors.

Another aspect of BTCJam that I enjoy is that withdrawals are instant. Other services like Bit Lending Club require manual approval of withdrawals that can add several hours to the amount of time it takes to withdraw your funds. BTCJam even has integration with Coinbase although that doesn’t seem to be working for me lately.