Around the beginning of the month I decided I wanted to invest in Ripple XRP. Little did I know, that there was about to be a surge in new account sign-ups at all the exchanges and they would simply stop taking new users.
First, I tried exchanges I had heard of such as Kraken and Bitstamp, but they wouldn't fully verify me even after a month of waiting. Then I looked into GateHub and Binance. The fee structure didn't seem good enough so I kept looking. I almost got an account on Bittrex, but they stopped taking new accounts the same day I tried them out.
All I could access was my old Coinbase account, and they don't sell XRP.
My plan at this point was to buy on Coinbase, transfer to Binance and then to an offline wallet. The instant credit card purchase at Coinbase initially failed because one of my cards wouldn't do business with them, and the other thought it was a fraud attempt. I got that all worked out after a weekend and then purchased some ETH. I went the ETH route because it is less volatile than BTC.
One I had the ETH, the transfer to Binance went smoothly. Next was the offline wallet.
There are several offline wallet options, but I'm going with Toast. Rippex seems to be the other option and it requires verification and a login which feels a lot like just leaving the XRP online.
All this took place while XRP went up 1200%, but that's OK because I know it's going higher.
Now at the end of the month it looks like a lot of people took the same path of using a credit card to purchase ETH at coinbase and then transferring to binance and then offline. I may have reinvented the wheel with all my research.