I wanted to do a simple thing — buy $20 USD worth of Raptoreum (RTM). None of the cryptocurrency exchanges I had an account with were trading it, which is no surprise since it is a fairly obscure altcoin.

Opening an account with Graviex was fairly simple and straightforward and there was nothing weird about it. I completed the Know Your Customer (KYC) steps without hassle. You can fund your account with a credit card, but I wanted to fund with crypto instead.

I had some cash (USD) in Bittrex, and since there’s not a lot of low-fee overlap between coins that trade on both exchanges, I bought some Ravencoin (RVN) to send over. Some of Bittrex’s withdrawal fees are exorbitant, but withdrawing Ravencoin is only 1 RVN, or just under 11 cents USD as I write this. There may have been another coin that I could have used that had lower fees, but I doubt its liquidity would be as good as RVN.

I sent the Ravencoin in, and it took 60 minutes to confirm — Graviex requires 60 confirmations, which is a bit on the long side, but not unreasonable.

Since I couldn’t trade Ravencoin for Raptoreum directly, I had to convert it to Bitcoin (BTC). Selling the RVN for BTC was fairly straightforward, although their trading interface takes a little getting used to.

Now that I had a little BTC, I created an order for Raptoreum. That altcoin has very low liquidity and even less liquidity on Graviex, with only 2941.6 RTM traded in the last 24 hours. It had a large spread with buy orders at 18.8 Satoshis and sell orders at 24.7 Satoshis, so my order just sat there for a while. I eventually gave up and put in a buy order at a higher price.

After the purchase, withdrawing my RTM was easy. The fee was only 0.002 RTM, much more reasonable than Bittrex.

The end result is that I ended up with only 1595 RTM. In other words, I spent $20 to get $15 worth of Raptoreum. That reminds me of trading pink sheet stocks 20 years ago. In terms of Graviex, today I am a market-moving whale.

It looks like SouthXchange also supports RTM and has a much higher volume, so I think I’ll try that exchange next. I probably should have started there, but $5 is a low price to pay for a learning experience in the world of fairly obscure altcoins.

I would trade on Graviex again, but I will definitely check the volume first next time.