An independent research desk for crypto in Los Angeles

Why this site exists

A friend of ours in Highland Park had been buying Bitcoin at a kiosk near her business because it was close and the screen was easy to use. When we worked out what those purchases had cost her compared with the same amounts through her credit union and an exchange, the difference was enough to cover a month of her commercial insurance. She had not been careless. She had used the most visible option, and in Los Angeles the most visible option is almost never the cheapest.

That gap — between what is easy to find and what is actually good — is the whole reason this desk exists. Los Angeles has more ways to convert dollars into digital assets than almost anywhere in the United States: licensed exchanges, roughly eighty cash access points inside the city limits, supermarket kiosks, staffed retail counters, barcode products at ordinary checkouts, and OTC desks serving Century City. They differ in cost by more than an order of magnitude, and nobody was explaining that clearly.

Meanwhile the rules changed underneath everyone. California's Digital Financial Assets Law brought licensing into force on 1 July 2026, and Senate Bill 401 had already capped kiosk transactions at $1,000 per customer per day and fees at the greater of $5 or 15%. Anything written about this city before 2024 is now actively misleading, and a lot of what ranks well was written before 2024.

What we do

We research how money moves between dollars and cryptocurrency in Los Angeles and LA County, and we publish what we find. That means comparing exchanges on the things that actually determine cost and control, mapping the kiosk and cash-counter networks neighborhood by neighborhood, reading California statute so you do not have to, and being specific about the tax consequences in a state that gives crypto gains no preferential capital gains rate.

We do our own field work. We open accounts and fund them, we compare on-screen quotes at machines on foot, we walk corridors from Koreatown to Fairfax, and we check license claims against public registers rather than taking a compliance page at its word. Where we are uncertain, we say so. Where a number comes from an operator's own marketing, we attribute it rather than presenting it as independent.

How we are funded, plainly

Some outbound links on this site may earn us a commission when a reader opens an account, at no cost to the reader. That is how the research is paid for, and we would rather state it in the second paragraph than bury it in a footer.

What that does not buy: placement, ranking, scores, or the content of anything we write. We do not accept payment for inclusion, we do not sell top positions, and no company has ever seen a page before publication. Our methodology page sets out exactly how we score platforms and what we weight, so you can judge whether our conclusions follow from our stated criteria. If they ever do not, tell us.

We think the honest version of this disclosure matters more in crypto than in most categories, because the affiliate incentives in this space are large and the harm from bad advice is irreversible.

What we will never do

• Ask for your seed phrase, private keys or account credentials. Nobody legitimate ever will, including us. We have no accounts, no wallets and no reason to want them.
• Hold, transmit or custody your funds. We are a publisher. We are not a broker, an exchange, a money transmitter, a tax adviser or a law firm.
• Give you financial advice. Nothing on this site is investment, legal or tax advice, and we are not licensed to provide any of it. We explain how things work and what they cost; what you should do with your money is a question for you and, where the amounts justify it, a licensed professional.
• Promise returns, or publish anything that implies them. Cryptocurrency is volatile and you can lose everything you put in. Any content presenting a crypto outcome as reliable is either wrong or selling.
• Rank by payment. Stated above, repeated here, because it is the one that matters most.

Our editorial position

We are neither crypto evangelists nor skeptics, and we try to write like it. Two examples of what that means in practice.

We are not anti-kiosk. For someone holding $150 in cash on a Sunday night with no bank account, a machine three blocks away is a real service and the alternative is nothing at all. That infrastructure exists because the need is genuine, and we say so. We also say, clearly, that if you have a bank account and you are using kiosks out of habit you are paying up to fifty times what the same purchase needs to cost.

Equally, we think the most useful page on this site is probably the one about kiosk fraud — because the FBI recorded more than $388 million in kiosk-related losses in a single year, with people aged 60 and over reporting over $257 million of it, and California leads every state in total crypto-related losses. Writing enthusiastically about this market without confronting that would be dishonest.

Corrections

Fees change, operators move machines, statutes are amended and we make mistakes. If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or missing context that changes the conclusion, email contact@losangeles-crypto.com and tell us. We will fix it and note the change. We would much rather hear it from a reader than leave a wrong number in front of the next one.

We also welcome the harder version of that email — the one that says our reasoning is wrong rather than our facts. Those are the useful ones.