Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange, popularly known as BitMEX is the first crypto margin trading platform in the market. It introduced a fully new market for trading in the cryptosphere. It is the giant in the crypto margin trading space due to its highly liquid market.
Since its launch, the exchange has covered many miles and scored many achievements. Its journey is also marred with few controversies but that has not affected its position or popularity in the market.
For new users, it’s always a difficult choice, whether to go with the established one like BitMEX or select the newly launched trading platforms.
Therefore, in this review guide, I will explain all the features, pros & cons, and whether to select this platform or not. Let’s begin.
What Is BitMEX?
BitMEX is a P2P crypto margin trading platform founded in 2014 and is registered in Seychelles. The exchange is founded by Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed with respective professional backgrounds in finance, high-frequency trading, and technology.
The exchange can be considered as a pioneer in crypto perpetual swaps. It offers trading in both perpetual swaps and crypto traditional futures contracts in all major cryptocurrencies.
A battle-proven exchange, it generates an average daily trading volume of over $2 billion and its XBTUSD market is the most liquid in the world.
Leverage offerings, Supported Coins, & Contracts
The users can trade in three different perpetual swaps in XBT, ETH, and XRP, eight-different traditional futures contracts, XBT, ETH, BCH, ADA, EOS, LTC, TRX, XRP. It recently introduced Quanto futures contracts in ETH.
The quantum of leverage varies from coin to coin. For example, for BTC perpetual and traditional futures, it offers up to 100X leverage. For ETH and XRP perpetual and ETH traditional futures, it offers up to 50X leverage. And, up to 20X leverage on the rest of the contracts, except LTC, where it is up to 33.33X.
Order Types
BitMEX offers all standard and advanced order types functionalities to its users. The standard order types include market order, limit order, stop orders, and take-profit orders.
Advanced order functions include hidden orders, iceberg orders, post-only orders, and close-on trigger order.
Platform Trading Fees
BitMEX follows a maker fee- taker fee pricing model and has a flat rate for all its contracts. Depending on the order types (long/short). it offers a maker rebate of 0.025% and charges a taker fee of 0.075%. Also, for perpetual swaps, the funding rate for the long and short positions depends on the liquidity position in the market and is updated every 8 hours.
Speaking of funding options, it only supports bitcoin for deposits and withdrawal and has a minimum deposit limit of 0.0001BTC. All the withdrawal requests are processed once a day at 13:00 UTC.
Not Impressed? You can always check some of the top BitMEX alternatives
Trading Platform
The trading platform is the most crucial part of any exchange as the platform’s interface plays a bigger role in placing winning trades. The BitMEX platform is integrated with two leading futures trading platforms, NinjaTrader and Sierra to provide a highly-specialized futures trading environment.
BitMEX has a simple and intuitive web-based trading platform. The platform interface consists of an order book, depth-chart, recent trades, charts, and position & open order widgets. It allows customization of the trading platform as per your preference.
The platform lists all coins available for trading on the top of the website, where you can select the coin and contract type (perpetual or traditional futures) you want to trade. On selecting a coin, the platform gets updated with relevant data and charts, where you can analyze the data accordingly. Let’s look at the different functionalities of the platform.
TA tools and charts
BitMEX offers tradingview’s charting solution to its users, where you get access to all relevant and advanced technical tools & indicators for doing advanced technical analysis. You can place multiple indicators on the chart at once, which helps you get a greater understanding of the price movement.
Order book
Despite the platform having a visual appeal, the order book design lags severely. The order book looks too flashy and excessive blinking makes it difficult to properly analyze the trade orders. However, you can maximize the order book window to full screen and also can group orders in different multiples ranging from 0.5 to 5000.
How To Start Trading On BitMEX
One of the main advantages of trading with BitMEX is, it doesn’t require KYC verification of its users, which means it supports fully anonymous trading.
Register
The registration process is quick and easy and you can start to trade within a few minutes. Click on the “Register” button on the top right corner of the website.
Enter your email address, password, country of residence, and your first & last name, and then click on the register button. Now, complete the registration process by visiting the verification link sent to your email address.
After successful registration, set up your two-factor authentication to secure the account by going to the “My Account” section, present on the left side of your screen. Simultaneously you can customize your trading interface by going to the “My Preferences” section.
Deposit
Now, go to the “Account” section, click on the “deposit” button to get your personal multi-sign bitcoin deposit address. The minimum deposit amount is 0.0001 BTC, which will be credited after one confirmation on the bitcoin network.
Trade
After successfully depositing your funds into the wallet, you can start your trading journey.
Confused between Bybit and BitMex? Read our detailed analysis of ByBit vs Bitmex to make a decision
Customer Support & Assets Security
BitMEX offers 24/7 online customer support in English, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Japanese. You can reach the customer support desk through multiple channels including email, ticketing-system, and different social media channels. The typical response time ranges between one-to-three hours.
It also has a dedicated FAQ page and knowledge base to assist amateur users to understand the platform better.
Now, speaking of asset security, the platform has a very robust and reliable trading platform. For wallet security, it uses a multi-sig cold store wallet, and every withdrawal request is manually supervised by multiple teams before processing it.
It relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) world-class system infrastructure to ensure system security. Further, the platform code is written on kdb+, which is also used by major banks in high-frequency trading applications. Also, BitMEX conducts a full risk-check after every order is placed.
Apart from all these security features, it has a bug bounty program on HackerOne to look for vulnerabilities in the platform.
Conclusion: Is BitMEX Safe & Legit?
Yes, BitMEX is one of the safest and legit crypto margin trading platforms in the market. There were issues in the past like client data leak, an allegation of insider trading, inflating trading volumes data, which the exchange has addressed in various stages of occurrence. It should be noted that the exchange has not encountered any security breach or loss of the user’s fund in its entire history.
Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of the platform:
Pros
- Trustworthy and one of the oldest crypto margin trading platform
- High leverage levels
- Good selection of trading pairs
- Deep liquidity
- Advance trading functions
- Competitive trading fees
- No deposit/withdrawal fees
- Robust and secured trading platform
- No KYC
Cons
- Not suitable for beginner traders
- No instant customer support
- No multi-currency/ fiat payment options
In short, a market-leading crypto derivatives platform suitable for professional and institutional traders. The platform provides all the necessary trading tools and support required in this high-frequency trading environment.
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