summary: BitMEX (short for Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency derivative exchange trading platform.
content: BitMEX (short for Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency derivative exchange trading platform. It offers leveraged contracts that are bought and sold in bitcoin. !OIP.jfifBitMEX, Crypto most advanced platform. In October 2020, the founders of BitMEX stepped down from their executive roles after U.S. authorities charged the firm over allegedly illegal conduct. Vivien Khoo, current chief operating officer of 100x Group, became Interim CEO, while Ben Radclyffe, commercial director, took on a supporting role with greater management of client relationships and oversight of financial products. Overview Founded in 2014, BitMEX offers Bitcoin derivatives trading, including margin trading and liquidation services. As of October 2020, it is ranked third by traded volume according to CoinMarketCap. Currently, BitMEX supports the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. BitMEX specializes in sophisticated financial operations such as margin trading, and it offers leverage of up to 100x on trades. BitMEX does not charge fees on deposits and withdrawals. When withdrawing Bitcoin, the minimum Bitcoin Network fee is set dynamically based on blockchain load. BitMEX charges a trading fee on every completed trade. The exchange also offers an affiliate program. An affiliate code is assigned to each BitMEX user, who can then use their code to invite other people to join the exchange. This allows users to earn a commission on the trading fees their referrals generate. History In August 2018, BitMEX moved into the 45th floor of the Cheung Kong Center in Hong Kong, one of the most expensive office buildings in the world. Around the same time as the move-in, BitMEX servers went down for scheduled maintenance. Almost immediately, Bitcoin prices increased by 4%. This ended up adding $10 billion to the market cap of all cryptocurrency assets. In a February 2019 blog post, BitMEX reported that it had traded a $1 trillion notional worth of cryptocurrency contracts in 2018. In the same blog post, BitMEX described the functioning of its insurance fund, which supports its leveraged contracts. In August 2019, The Block Crypto reported that BitMEX Insurance Fund had increased in value by about 50% since January 1, 2019. In April 2019, the Chicago-based trading software developer Trading Technologies (TT) announced a new partnership with HDR Global Trading, owner of BitMEX. TT said in a blog post that through this partnership, TT's users eligible to trade at BitMEX would have full access to BitMEX's products, including its XBT/USD Perpetual Swap. Arthur Hayes, the founder of BitMEX, said that this new partnership will "advance our mutual vision to unlock access to cutting-edge cryptocurrency products." In May 2019, BitMEX wrote on its blog that, although the company offers a maximum of 100x leverage on its derivatives trading, the majority of traders do not trade at maximum leverage. BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes said that this reflected "quite responsible" behavior on the part of BitMEX's customers. According to BitMEX's data, the average leverage used by BitMEX traders is 29x on long positions and 26x on short positions. In July 2019 Nouriel Roubini released a report in which he suggested that BitMEX may be involved in "systemic illegality." He said that BitMEX allows its users to take on too much risk. He also said that it's possible that liquidation of user accounts may contribute significantly to the trading platform's income, and that BitMEX may trade against its clients, citing a widely-circulated post on Medium from 2018. Though representatives from BitMEX denied these claims, Roubini wrote that Hayes, BitMEX, and anybody else facilitating cryptocurrency trading from overseas regulatory "safe havens" should be investigated. By late 2019, global Bitcoin derivatives accounted for $5-10 billion worth of trade volume per day - more than 10 times the volume created by Bitcoin spot trading. BitMEX accounted for a large percentage of it, trading an average of $1.82 billion Bitcoin per day. In October 2020, the BitMEX team announced expanding its product line with the addition of three new futures contracts linked to the stablecoin USDT. According to the exchange, Binance Coin (BNB), Polkadot (DOT) and yEarn (YFI) will start to be available for trading on BitMEX on October 30. BitMEX offers a leverage of up to 33x for the first token and 25x for the other two. On October 21, 2020, BitMEX accelerated its mandate for all customers to verify their identities by November 5, 2020, three months earlier than its original deadline of early February 2021. Under the accelerated timeline, by 0:00 UTC on November 5, all BitMEX traders and affiliates' identities must be verified before increasing or opening new positions. By December 4, all accounts must be verified in order to process withdrawals from the exchange. After December 4, BitMEX will begin to review the remaining open positions on unverified accounts and communicate with the account holders. Funds will be recoverable and eligible for normal withdrawals post verification. Technical Outages On March 13, 2020, BitMEX experienced two distributed denial-of-service attacks, ten hours apart, which interfered with the internal message queuing. In both cases, trading was halted. The company attributed the first trading halt to a hardware failure in a tweet: "Between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC 13 March 2020 we became aware of a hardware issue with our cloud service provider causing BitMEX requests to be delayed. Normal service resumed at 03:00 UTC. As a reminder, the latest system updates can be found on our status page https://status.bitmex.com." BitMEX said later that it had refunded a total of approximately 40 Bitcoin to 156 customers whose positions were erroneously liquidated as a result of the outage. According to a BitMEX report posted on the company's website, by the time the second attack occurred ten hours later, it realized that the first outage was caused by a DDoS and moved quickly to resolve performance issues caused by the DDoS attack. BitMEX also reported that not only were both attacks executed by the same party but also that that party had conducted an earlier attack in February. February’s attack, however, was absorbed by BitMEX’s normal DDoS mitigation strategies. The trading engine went down for about an hour-and-a-half on May 19, 2020, from 12.13 UTC to 13.40 UTC, according to its Telegram message feed. No reason was given, but the customers were assured that their funds were safe. Restructuring ("100x") In July 2020 HDR Global Trading, the parent company of BitMEX announced that it would restructure into a new holding company called 100x, which would be the new holding company for the BitMEX platform and its related assets. The announcement said that with the new corporate structure 100x would "pursue a broader vision to reshape the modern digital financial system into one which is inclusive and empowering." Many interpreted this as a sign that BitMEX was gearing up to branch out, making new products and offering new services outside of the cryptocurrency trading space. Arthur Hayes, Co-Founder and CEO of 100x, said, "Financial services play a crucial role in our everyday lives and in the global economy. Yet, in this digital age, financial services remain too slow and too complicated to transform. We are setting out to change the status quo and reshape the modern digital financial system into one which is more inclusive, and empowering". The 100x Group is led by HDR's founders, Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed. They are also joined by recently appointed Non-Executive Chairman, Dr. David Wong. Losing Investor Interest Data from Arcane Research showed that open interest on Bitmex’s Bitcoin derivatives market touched a new low of 45,122 BTC on October 1, 2020. The figure represented a 16% drop since the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced charges against BitMEX and its executives for allegedly operating an unregistered trading platform. According to Arcane Research’s post on Twitter, “the former yearly low was painted on the 30th of April when the open interest bottomed at 61,975 BTC.” The post added that in the wake of the act CFTC, traders are “definitely closing their positions on Bitmex”. In addition, Coinmetrics data showed that during the same period, a total of 37,000 BTC ($387 million) was moved out of BitMEX as investors panicking sought to secure their funds. In a comment on Twitter, Coinmetrics added that Binance and Gemini together captured over 1/3 of the BitMEX withdrawals. Products & Services Perpetual Contracts BitMEX offers what it calls "perpetual" contracts, which are similar to futures contracts. The difference between perpetual contracts and futures is that, unlike futures, perpetual contracts do not have expiry dates, allowing the trader to hold on to a position until the trader chooses to end it. In a Tweet on February 4, 2020, Arthur Hayes announced that BitMEX would launch trading of Ripple/USD swaps the next day, saying, "Is it called Ripple, XRP, or dog\]? Who knows, who cares. It’s worth more than zero so it’s time to trade the USD pair on BitMEX. Boo-Yaka-sha!"[. Options Founder Arthur Hayes revealed in a podcast in mid-April 2019 that BitMEX was developing an options trading platform that would be launched a year to a year and a half later. Hayes said that BitMEX was working with university professors on the design. BitMEX Mobile The company announced on September 1, 2020, that it had launched a mobile application, BitMEX Mobile, which provides access to all of BitMEX's trading platforms. The application is available for