GoTyme Go Crypto review: simple exposure, with the exit door closed

Reviewed by the Crypto Philippines Editorial TeamUpdated September 28, 2026 · 12 min read

GoTyme Go Crypto is the crypto section of the GoTyme Bank app: twelve coins, bought with pesos from your GoTyme account, under the bank’s own BSP virtual asset licence. It is a good fit if you already bank with GoTyme and want simple exposure. It is a poor fit if you want to withdraw coins, trade stablecoins or see the fees up front.

We score it 7.6 out of 10, which puts it fifth in our ranking of the best crypto exchanges in the Philippines. The score rewards the licence and the convenience, and it takes points off for unpublished fees, the peso-to-dollar conversion and the closed loop. The weights are explained on our how we rate page. This review is based on GoTyme’s public crypto page, its help centre, the launch announcement from its broker partner Alpaca and press coverage, all read on 28 September 2026. We did not trade with real money for this article.

Is GoTyme crypto licensed and legit?

Yes. GoTyme Bank Corporation appears on the BSP list of licensed virtual asset service providers (as of 15 July 2026) as a bank VASP, with its office on the 21st floor of the work.able Giga Tower in Bridgetowne, Quezon City. BitPinas dates the licence to October 2024; the BSP list itself carries no date, so treat the month as a press report. Only nine firms held an active VASP licence on that list, and just two of them are banks: GoTyme and UnionBank. You can read our UnionBank crypto review for the other one, and the full list of licensed crypto exchanges in the Philippines for the rest.

The BSP licence is the main reason to take Go Crypto seriously. The service sits inside an institution that already handles your salary, savings and KYC, and the regulator supervises the crypto business as well. Behind the scenes GoTyme relies on Alpaca, a brokerage infrastructure provider, whose Broker API powers the trading and the market data. Alpaca’s announcement of 8 December 2025 named 11 launch coins; GoTyme’s help page says PAXG was added in March 2026, and GoTyme calls itself the first bank in the Philippines to offer digital gold.

What the licence does not do is insure the coins. GoTyme’s crypto page says plainly that crypto is high-risk and volatile, and that crypto holdings are not insured by the PDIC. Your ordinary peso deposits keep their deposit insurance. The moment you convert them into coins, that part of your money is exposed to the market alone. For the wider legal picture, our explainer on crypto regulations in the Philippines covers what the BSP does and does not protect.

How Go Crypto works, in short

You do not open a separate account with an outside company. In the GoTyme app you complete a short risk-profile questionnaire, accept the crypto terms, and fund a crypto balance from your GoTyme Bank account. GoTyme says the money is “automatically converted to USD” and ready for investing, and Alpaca’s announcement describes a dedicated Crypto USD account fed from the Everyday account. From there you pick a coin, review the live price, type an amount and confirm. The app works out how many units of the coin you get.

The risk profile is worth a comment. It is not a pass-or-fail gate in the way UnionBank’s assessment is. GoTyme’s own page says an account can be activated even if crypto may not match your profile; you are warned, not blocked. Some early press coverage said the feature was limited to select users in October 2025. BitPinas covered that early access, and the 8 December 2025 announcement presented the service as launched; eligibility, KYC and transaction limits still apply, and we could not confirm whether every customer sees the feature. This site does not include a full step-by-step, because the flow is short and lives in the app. The point of a review is to judge what sits underneath it.

GoTyme crypto fees and the dollar conversion

This is where you need to read carefully. GoTyme’s help material says the app may charge a spread fee (the gap between buy and sell prices), a transaction fee (a percentage of the trade) and a network fee. It does not publish the amounts on the public pages we could read, and the crypto page states no fee or minimum at all. So we cannot give you a number, and you should distrust any third-party site that does without showing its working. The honest description is: fees exist, they are not published, and you find them in the app at the moment of trade.

A network fee is normally what you pay to move coins on a blockchain. Because Go Crypto is a closed loop with no external transfers, we could not work out when that charge would ever apply to a customer, and GoTyme does not explain it publicly. We list it because GoTyme does.

The part most reviews skip is the currency. Every peso you invest is converted to US dollars first, and, as far as we can tell, dollars are converted back when you sell. GoTyme does not publish the rate it uses or the margin on it. A simple example shows why this matters. Suppose, purely as an assumption, that the conversion margin is 1% each way and the trading spread is 1%. Then a round trip costs about 3% before any transaction fee, and the price of the coin has to rise by that much just for you to break even. These are illustrative numbers, not GoTyme’s. The point is that three layers of cost hide behind one tap. That is why we tell readers to test with a small amount: buy ₱500, look at what the app says you could sell for immediately, and note the difference. Our guide to crypto exchange fees and spreads shows how to run that test on any platform.

Getting pesos into GoTyme costs little if you already use the bank. GoTyme’s help centre lists in-store cash deposits through Robinsons Retail stores, 7-Eleven branches and Pay&Go kiosks, though the page we read gave no fee or limit, so check the app. Moving pesos out by InstaPay was listed at ₱0 to ₱9 in our research. Those figures are for the bank account, not for crypto itself.

Coins, minimums and limits

The list is short and curated: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Chainlink, Uniswap, Aave and PAX Gold. GoTyme says it reviews the lineup regularly and may add coins based on market performance and stability. There is no USDT or USDC, no meme coins and no Dogecoin. If your main use of crypto is holding dollar stablecoins, this is the wrong tool; our guide on how to buy USDT in the Philippines covers better options. PAXG is the unusual one: a token tied to gold, which suits people who want a gold-linked position without a separate broker.

The minimum order is 0.000001 of a coin, according to the GoTyme help material summarised in our research. For Bitcoin that is a fraction of a centavo, so the practical floor is whatever peso amount the app accepts. Transaction limits exist, but GoTyme does not publish figures on its public pages, and we could not confirm them. If you plan to trade more than a few thousand pesos at a time, check your limit in the app first.

The closed loop: safe cage or locked door?

GoTyme promotes the closed loop as protection: your money stays inside the app, with no external wallets or transfers. There is real logic to that. Most crypto losses among newcomers come from sending coins to the wrong address, the wrong network or a scammer, and a closed loop removes all three. Our crypto scams guide shows how common those are.

But the same feature means you do not really hold crypto in the sense the community uses the word. You hold a position in an account run by GoTyme and its broker. You cannot pay a friend in Bitcoin, send Ethereum to a hardware wallet, use DeFi or move to another exchange for a better price. If GoTyme changes the coin list or the terms, your options are to sell or accept the change. Compare that with Maya, which lets you send and receive on outside networks (see our Maya crypto review), and with the wallet inside GCash, covered in our GCrypto review.

To be fair, closed loop is not a defect for everyone. If your goal is a small long-term position that you will sell into pesos one day, you may never miss the withdrawal button.

GoTyme vs Maya vs GCrypto vs Coins.ph

Here is how Go Crypto lines up against the platforms Filipinos most often compare it with. Figures come from our research files and the platforms’ own pages as of 28 September 2026.

The table shows the trade-off. GoTyme has the shortest list, no outward transfers and an extra currency step. In return you get a bank licence and one fewer app if GoTyme is already where you keep your money. For larger or frequent trades, an order-book exchange is usually cheaper; our exchange ranking shows the alternatives, and the GCash crypto guide covers the biggest wallet option.

Security and support

Security here means the bank’s app security, not a separate crypto login. Crypto lives inside the GoTyme app, so we expect it to use the same sign-in as the rest of the bank, though GoTyme does not describe crypto-specific security on its public pages, and Alpaca handles the brokerage side. We have no independent audit to cite. On scale, BitPinas reported 6.5 million users and ₱30 billion in deposits as of July 2025, and the joint venture between the Gokongwei Group and Tyme Group is one of the better-known digital banks in the country. The iOS app is rated 4.6 in the Philippine App Store from about 21,000 ratings (28 September 2026), but that score covers the whole banking app, not crypto specifically.

For help, use the in-app chat or the help centre at gotyme.com.ph/help. GoTyme’s crypto page links to its terms, risk disclosures and complaints policy, and being a BSP-supervised bank is an advantage over an unlicensed offshore platform, where you have no local regulator to go to.

Pros and cons

Who Go Crypto suits, and who should look elsewhere

Go Crypto suits a specific person: someone who already banks with GoTyme, wants a small position in Bitcoin or Ethereum without learning wallets, and expects to sell back into pesos rather than move coins around. If that is you, the convenience is real and the licence is stronger than that of most alternatives. Start small, note the buy and sell difference, and keep the position modest.

It suits you less if you want to move coins out, hold stablecoins, use altcoins beyond the 12, trade actively or compare precise costs before you commit. Active traders will find the unpublished spread and the currency step frustrating, and anyone who wants to cash out crypto to a bank or e-wallet quickly should read our guide to selling crypto for cash in the Philippines. Once you outgrow the app, the usual next step is a peso exchange with an order book, such as those in our PDAX review.

Whatever you choose, remember that a bank logo does not reduce price risk. Only invest what you can afford to lose, and keep records of what you buy and sell, because gains can have tax consequences; our crypto tax guide explains what to keep.