One of the leading digital wallets in the country, Paymaya was rebranded recently to its new name called Maya. Along with the change of its name, is also the change on its user interface. To entice customers, Maya have offer lots of promotional products like the 6% interest rate for savings account that is opened in the Maya app.
Aside from that, they have also added new features to the app and one of these features is the crypto currency trading. This feature is still in beta but you can already start trading in the Maya app for as low as Php1.
Investing in crypto currency thru the Maya app is just very easy. All you need to do is to cash-in to your Maya digital wallet then go to the crypto section of the app and find the crypto that you want to buy. Maya's crypto feature works very similar to CoinsPh (another popular digital wallet operating in the Philippines).
The available crypto currency that you can trade in Maya are somehow different to that in CoinsPh. For instance, ADA (Cardano) is already available in Maya but this is not yet available in CoinsPh.
However, one thing I observed is that Maya's prices for crypto seems to be a little higher when you buy and a little lower when you sell compared to the actual trading prices. I am guessing that they have factored in the transaction fee to the prices. The price difference is not the big anyway.
I have been trading crypto in the Maya app for more than a month now and so far everything is working fine. The only problem I have with this feature is that it takes a bit longer time to load the details.
There is also system downtime once in a while which could result to opportunity lost because of inavailability to trade. But this is understandable for now because it is still in beta stage. Also, this feature is just basic trading, buying and selling. Do not hope for any fancy features like what we see in Binance.
Going to the question if it is safe to use this app for crypto trading, my answer is yes, it is safe. Maya or Paymaya is a trusted and legitimate business that offers digital banking services with license granted by the Central Bank of the Philippines (Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas). Voyager Innovations, Inc. owned the Maya Bank with PLDT as their main or primary shareholder. In terms of deposits to their savings account, it is also insured by PDIC.