Crypto ATMs in Georgia: Cryptomat locations, real fees and how to use them

If you have lari in your pocket and want Bitcoin or USDT in your wallet within ten minutes, a crypto ATM is the most direct route in Georgia. You walk up to a machine in a Nikora, Spar or Libre supermarket, scan your wallet, feed in banknotes and the coins arrive on the blockchain. No account, no app, no bank transfer that might raise questions at your bank.

That convenience has a price, and in Georgia it is a fairly high one. This page shows where the machines are, which few of them also buy crypto back for cash, how to use one without losing coins on the wrong network, and how the cost compares with buying through a registered exchangeVASPVirtual Asset Service Provider — a crypto exchange, ATM operator or custodian. In Georgia every VASP must be registered with the National Bank (NBG). or your bank app. For a wider overview of every route, start with our guide on how to buy crypto in Georgia.

Who runs Georgia’s crypto ATMs

Almost every crypto ATM you’ll see in Georgia belongs to one operator: Cryptomat LLC. It is entered in the National Bank of Georgia’s NBGNBGNational Bank of Georgia — the central bank. It supervises banks and, since 2023, crypto service providers (VASPs). register under number 0005-9404 (registered 19 March 2024) with permission for exchange services “including via kiosks” and for transfers. The old cryptomat.ge address now redirects to cryptomat.com, where the operator publishes its full location list and shows “License: 0005-9404” in the footer. Strictly speaking, Georgian law provides for registration with the NBG rather than a licence, but the two words are used interchangeably on most sites.

Three other providers on the NBG register are allowed to run kiosks:

• Bitexchange — 0004-9404, head office on Sairme Street, Tbilisi
• Matio — 0022-9404, head office on Kazbegi Avenue, Tbilisi
• PayBit Georgia — 0033-9404, Rustaveli Street 11, Batumi

We could not confirm how many machines these three actually operate, or where. Their websites were unreachable when we checked, so treat any figure you see elsewhere with caution. Some English-language blogs also mention machines under brand names that don’t appear on the register; a provider may trade under a different legal name, but if you can’t match a machine to a registration number, don’t use it. Our list of licensed crypto exchanges in Georgia has the full register with search.

Where the machines are: city by city

Cryptomat’s network is dense in the capital and thin everywhere else. Counting the operator’s own list gives roughly 150–160 entries depending on the day; the split below adds up to 156, and one site can host two machines (Nikora on Angisa Street in Batumi has an indoor and an outdoor unit). Most hosts are supermarket and retail chains — Nikora, Spar, Libre, Daily, Drive, Axis, City Mall, Gorgia, Pixel, Kalata, Bimart, West Point — and some locations are marked as open 24 hours.

Poti, Kobuleti, Ozurgeti, Akhaltsikhe, Mtskheta and Ambrolauri have no Cryptomat at all. Tap a city on the map to see the count and the nearest alternatives.

The machines that pay out lari

Most Cryptomat machines only sell crypto to you. About ten are labelled Buy & Sell, which means they will also take your coins and pay out lari. In Tbilisi these are:

• Galleria Tbilisi — 2/4 Rustaveli Avenue
• Tbilisi Mall — 16th km, Aghmashenebeli Avenue
• Goodwill Dighomi — 34 Parnavaz Mepe Avenue
• Orbeliani Bazaar — 3 Vekua Street
• Axis, Kazbegi Avenue — 24G Kazbegi Avenue, Saburtalo
• City Mall Saburtalo — 1 Kavtaradze Street
• City Mall Gldani — 1 Vekua Street
• Isani Mall — 8a Navtlugi Street
• Homemart Vake — 37L Chavchavadze Avenue

Outside the capital there is exactly one: West Point, 2 Shartava Street, Kutaisi. All 11 Batumi machines and all five in Rustavi are buy-only.

Why older articles say you can’t cash out

If you’ve read that “Tbilisi crypto ATMs don’t pay out cash”, that line comes mainly from a Cointelegraph city guide from September 2024 and the blogs that copied it. It is outdated: Cryptomat now lists sell-enabled machines in several Tbilisi malls and in Kutaisi. The same goes for figures like “23 Bitcoin ATMs in Tbilisi” or “39 ATMs at last count” — those are years-old snapshots of a network that has since grown several times over.

How to buy crypto at a Cryptomat, step by step

Before you leave home, install a wallet you control. A non-custodialNon-custodialYou hold the keys yourself. Nobody can freeze the wallet — and nobody can recover it if you lose the seed phrase. app on your phone works fine for ATM-sized amounts; our crypto wallet guide compares the options. The machine sends coins to whatever address you scan, so the wallet has to exist first.

Cryptomat’s own how-to guide is published as an image-only file we couldn’t read, so the order of screens on a given machine may differ slightly. The logic — phone, address, coin, cash, confirm — stays the same.

How to sell crypto for lari at a sell-enabled machine

Selling works in the opposite direction, and only at the Buy & Sell locations. You choose “sell”, pick the coin and network, verify your phone, and the machine shows a deposit address as a QR code. You send the coins from your wallet to that address, and once the transaction is confirmed the machine pays out lari. Payouts are in lari only — no dollars or euros.

Two practical details the operator doesn’t spell out publicly: how many network confirmations a sale needs before cash comes out, and whether you wait at the machine or receive a code to redeem later. Ask support before your first sale, and send a small test amount if you’re unsure.

A secondary source puts the sell limit at roughly 5,000–10,000 GEL, lower than the buy limit. For anything larger — or if you’re in Batumi, where no machine buys crypto — look at the alternatives in our guide to cashing out crypto in Georgia or a registered OTC desk or exchange office.

Fees: what a machine purchase really costs

Cryptomat does not publish its fees. There is no percentage on the website and no fee table on the location list. The figures that circulate come from a Georgian guide, which puts the all-in cost of an ATM purchase at roughly 6–12%, including the spreadSpreadThe gap between the buy and sell price. A desk that buys USDT at 2.57 GEL and sells at 2.62 GEL earns a 0.05 GEL spread on each coin. — the gap between the machine’s rate and the market rate. We treat that as indicative, not official.

On 500 GEL, that range means you’d receive crypto worth about 440–470 GEL at market prices. The calculator at the top of this page uses 8% as a midpoint; change the amount to see how the gap grows. The best test is your own: before confirming, compare the crypto amount on screen with the live price, and you’ll know that day’s real cost to the tetri.

The Cryptal figures come from its published fee page and cover only the deposit; trading and withdrawal fees aren’t listed there. See our Cryptal review for the whole fee table and our P2P guide for how lari P2P works.

The button above leads to CEX.IO, a global exchange operating since 2013 with US state money-transmitter licences (NMLS 1804170) and UK FCA cryptoasset registration (FRN 1007192). It takes Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Google Pay but has no GEL wallet and no P2P, and it is not on the NBG register — so your card is charged in a foreign currency. Compare card routes in our guide to buying crypto with a card in Georgia.

Limits and ID checks

Here, too, the operator is silent, and the only detailed numbers are secondary. Take them as a rough guide:

There is a legal backdrop to these numbers. Under Georgian AML rules as summarised by Andersen, a VASP must carry out full KYCKYCKnow Your Customer: identity checks (passport, selfie, sometimes proof of address) that licensed services must run before you trade. checks for a single virtual-asset transaction above USD 1,000, EUR 1,000 or GEL 3,000, and whenever a business relationship is established. So a phone-only ceiling of a couple of thousand lari is consistent with the law, and splitting one large purchase into several small ones to stay under it is exactly the pattern AMLAMLAnti-money-laundering rules. They are why an exchange or bank may ask where your money came from. monitoring is designed to catch. If you’re buying serious amounts, a registered exchange with a proper account is the cleaner route.

Whether a foreign mobile number is accepted for SMS verification is something we couldn’t confirm. Tourists can buy a local SIM cheaply on arrival; our page for expats and visitors covers what else to sort out.

Which coins you can and can’t buy

Every Cryptomat location lists the same five assets:

• Bitcoin (BTC) — on-chain only; no LightningLightning NetworkA layer on top of Bitcoin for near-instant, very cheap payments. Useful for small amounts, not for buying property. option
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Litecoin (LTC) — see our Litecoin page
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
• USDT on ERC-20 and TRC-20

Not available at the machines: Dogecoin, Solana, XRP, Gram (formerly TON) and Pi. If you came looking for those, a local exchange such as Cryptal lists DOGE, SOL, XRP and TRX in lari, and our Dogecoin and Pi coin pages explain the options for each.

Rules that may reshape the network

On 8 September 2026 the NBG announced a tougher supervisory framework for crypto providers. Firms offering exchange (explicitly including via kiosks) or transfer services will need at least GEL 150,000 in supervisory capital, plus a formal risk-management framework covering cybersecurity and business continuity. Providers already registered have until 1 July 2027 for the risk framework and 1 September 2027 for the capital.

For a large operator like Cryptomat this is unlikely to change much day to day. For small kiosk operators it may decide whether they stay in business, so expect the ATM landscape to consolidate rather than grow in variety. Our crypto regulation guide follows the changes.

On tax: for individuals, profit from selling crypto isn’t treated as Georgian-source income, so it’s taxed at 0% under a 2019 Ministry of Finance decision — with caveats explained in our crypto tax guide.

When an ATM makes sense — and when it doesn’t

A Cryptomat is a good fit when you have cash, want a modest amount quickly, and value not opening an account. Tourists topping up a wallet for a few hundred lari, someone buying their first 100 GEL of Bitcoin to learn, or a person who would rather not have crypto purchases on a bank statement are typical cases.

It is a poor fit for anything regular or large. At 6–12%, buying 5,000 GEL of USDT at a machine could cost several hundred lari more than a TBC Pay top-up at a local exchange. If you’re in Batumi and need to sell, the machines can’t help at all. And if anyone on the phone or in a chat tells you to deposit cash into a crypto ATM to “protect your bank account” or “pay a fine”, stop — that is a classic scam pattern, covered in our crypto scams guide.

For an operator-level assessment — what Cryptomat does well, where it falls short and how it links to the Cryptal exchange — read our full Cryptomat review. If you’d rather pay cash at a terminal than at an ATM, our guide to buying crypto with cash compares PayBox, TBC Pay and CPAY.