As you might have heard, exchanges are not a great place to buy and store Bitcoin. Along with you not having true custody of your Bitcoin, they have a bad habit of going insolvent.
As a friendly reminder, you will find Bitcoin experts continuing to recommend self-custody with a hardware wallet like a Ledger, Trezor or others.
But, where does one buy Bitcoin now to fill their wallets?
And more importantly - how can one easily stack there sats with recurring purchases?
This article will walk you through two major options - Swan Bitcoin and Strike - so you can make your own decision!
What Swan Bitcoin Offers
Swan Bitcoin was founded in 2019 and is well regarded by the Bitcoin industry. The founder, Cory Klippsten, is still with the company and a huge supporter of the Bitcoin community. Their first west coast conference, Pacific Bitcoin, was a great success in the fall of 2022.
Swan offers a variety of services for individuals and businesses. These include:
- Purchasing Bitcoin - one-time and recurring
- Bitcoin treasury services for businesses
- Bitcoin benefit plans for businesses
- Retirement IRAs with Bitcoin
- Private services for high net worth individuals
- Advisory services for financial advisors
- Referral and affiliate services
- Conferences for everyone
Clearly Swan has a large set of offerings. We are going to focus on services for individuals to purchase Bitcoin on a recurring basis.
Swan allows you to set up regular purchases, from your bank account. You can purchase a minimum of $10, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can start on any day of the week you would like. At this time, it looks like a single schedule is offered by Swan.
Swan does also offer to automate that these purchases go to your preferred address on a weekly basis. In this way, you can automate moving them to your hardware wallet.
Swan fees are 0.99%, which are lower than most exchanges.
Swan offers both a mobile app and website interface. They also offer a number of additional authentication steps for security, like Google Authenticator, in addition to text messages.
Swan does require the normal “know your customer” (KYC) information for recurring purchases, such as name, address, and ID.
Overall, the Swan experience is smooth and easy to use. They offer more services than Strike, but less granularity. More on that in a moment.
What Strike Offers
Strike is a slightly different animal than Swan Bitcoin, but does also offer the ability to regularly purchase Bitcoin. Strike was also founded in 2019 (by Jack Mallers) and has a strong following in the Bitcoin community.
In addition to these services, Strike offers services for individuals and businesses:
- Direct Deposit (i.e. your paycheck) into Strike with no additional fees
- Send and receive payments with no fees
- APIs for merchants to accept payments
- Send tips via twitter
- New retail/etail commerce functionality (not yet available at the time this was written)
In addition to their APIs, Strike offers a mobile app for Apple and Android, and a Chrome web browser plugin.
The recurring purchase functionality in Strike is where they really shine.
You can purchase as little as $0.01 on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. And, you can set up multiples of these purchases. So, you could have an hourly $0.01 purchase, a daily $1 purchase, a weekly $10 purchase and a monthly $100 purchase. In a year, in this example, that would add up to USD $2172.60. This could be a great way to stack sats.
Please note, your bank source that you purchase from may first flag hourly purchases as a security issue. This has nothing to do with Strike - just alerting you to this possibility.
While you can move this bitcoin into your hardware wallet of choice, you would need to do that manually. The interface does support QR codes, and it’s very easy to do. However, you just have to stay on top of this yourself.
Which Should You Pick?
Quite honestly, both of these companies do a great job. In practice, we use both of them.
That said, here’s a list of pros/cons, so you can decide what works best for you, if you only want to pick one. We also offer some sign-up links below, so you can get started quickly.
Swan Bitcoin | Strike |
Pros:
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Cons:
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How to Get Started
You can use our links below to quickly sign-up to one (or both) of these awesome services.
Full disclosure, yes we get something out of this at Avid Intent - and so do you. The specifics of the offers are below.
Swan - Use this link to get a free e-book and $10 of Bitcoin
Strike - Use this link to get $6 of Bitcoin
Enjoy, and happy stacking!