By
Andrew MunroUpdated
Bamboo is a microinvestment app that lets you automatically invest your spare change in Bitcoin, Ethereum, gold and silver. It works by rounding up purchases to the nearest dollar, and investing the difference into the assets of your choice. Of all the ways of investing in cryptocurrencies its one of the less common ones, so keep reading to see how it stacks up.
Check out our full list of pros and cons or read on.
Bamboo has its own native token (BAM). By default, fees are paid with BAM tokens. If you don't have enough BAM, the fees will be taken out of your next scheduled direct debit or payment.
If neither of those are enough to cover the fees, Bamboo will sell or transfer the cryptocurrencies held in your account to pay the outstanding fees
You cannot deposit or withdraw cryptocurrency from Bamboo. The only deposits are fiat currency payments from the linked bank account, and the only withdrawals are when you request that Bamboo sells your cryptocurrency and transfers funds to the same linked account.
The deposit and withdrawal fees are based on the amount, and are charged for deposits and withdrawals to and from your linked bank account.
| Deposit/withdrawal amount | Fee |
|---|---|
$100 or less | $1.49 |
$100 to $250 | $2.49 |
$250 to $500 | $3.99 |
Over $500 | 0.8% of transaction |
Each round-up deposit does not occur immediately. Rather, Bamboo queries your bank account every few days and adds up the rounded-up amount from transactions in that period of time, then pulls that amount all in one go.
According to Bamboo, it does not take a profit on cryptocurrency exchange rate margins.
When you opt to automatically round-up your purchases, the app will periodically sweep your transfers and pull the spare change. The sweep happens every time the spare change adds up to $50. You'll be able to see your progress towards the next sweep in your app.
The minimum amount you can manually top up with is $50. There is no minimum withdrawal amount.
The deposit fee on the automatic sweeps and the minimum transfers comes out equivalent to a 3% fee, which is on par with many other cryptocurrency brokerage platforms. But the equivalent fee is considerably lower for larger deposits. For example, a $500 deposit with the $3.99 transfer fee is equivalent to 0.8%, making it overall much better value overall than a similar-sized purchase at another broker.
However, you cannot withdraw your cryptocurrency from Bamboo. You can only get paid the fiat value of your portfolio (minus the withdrawal fee) to the same linked bank account.
How long transfers take depends on how long it takes to send funds between Bamboo and your linked bank account. Transfers will typically be same-day for Australian bank accounts.
Transfers typically take
Link your bank account to the app and set up (or turn off) the automatic top-ups, choose your portfolio balance and adjust the settings as desired.
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How we picked these
Andrew Munro was the global cryptocurrency editor at Finder. During his time he covered all aspects of cryptocurrency and the blockchain. Before he became cryptocurrency editor, he was a content writer for Finder covering various topics over his nearly 5 years in the role. Prior to joining Finder he was a web copywriter. Andrew has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New South Wales. See full bio
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