On-ramps reviewed

A crypto on-ramp turns ordinary money into crypto and sends it straight to a wallet address. Most people meet one as the "Buy" button inside a wallet or app. The widget belongs to a payment company such as MoonPay, Transak, Ramp or Banxa, which checks your identity, takes the card or bank payment and sends the coins; MoonPay's developer docs, for example, describe its widget running inside the partner app while MoonPay runs the checks and delivers the crypto.

So the company taking your money is the on-ramp, not the wallet you opened. Before paying, check which company and which licence sit behind the button.

You can pay up to four layers: the provider's fee, the blockchain network fee, a spread built into the exchange rate, and sometimes a partner fee added by the wallet or app. Card payments cost more than bank transfers at every provider that publishes a separate bank rate:

Fixed fees and minimums hit small orders hardest: on a $50 card purchase, Transak's $1 fixed fee alone adds 2%. Our on-ramp cost calculator works out the provider fee for your amount and payment method.

The large on-ramps are registered businesses, but registration means different things in different places. All four we review are on the UK's FCA register for crypto, which covers anti-money-laundering supervision only: the FCA notes that the Financial Ombudsman can't consider complaints and the FSCS won't pay out if these firms fail. In the EU, MoonPay, Ramp and Banxa have entities authorised under MiCA. Transak was not in ESMA's register of authorised crypto firms when we checked on 16 October 2026, and its terms route EU residents to its UK company. Registration is not a clean bill of health either: Canada's anti-money-laundering regulator, FINTRAC, fined a MoonPay subsidiary C$536,853 in November 2025, a penalty the subsidiary has appealed to Canada's Federal Court.

Identity checks come from the same rules. The FATF standards require crypto firms to verify customers and pass sender and recipient details along with transfers. In the EU, for transfers over €1,000 involving your own wallet, the provider must also assess whether you control that address.

The bigger danger is usually the person who told you to buy. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $11.4 billion in reported crypto-related losses in 2025, $7.2 billion of it from investment fraud, and the FTC's advice is blunt: "Only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency." Never buy crypto to send to an address someone else gave you.

Every on-ramp gets the same five weighted pillars, set out in our on-ramp scoring methodology: cost (35%), speed (20%), payment methods (20%), country coverage (15%) and KYC friction (10%).

• Full reviews: MoonPay, Ramp, Transak and Banxa.
• Country guides: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
• On-ramp cost calculator: provider fees by amount, country and payment method.
• Guides: how to buy bitcoin and how to buy ethereum.