CoinSpectator Blog

Operating from Hong Kong, BitMex was founded in 2014 by web application expert Samuel Reed, ex banker Arthur Hayes and Ben Delo whose background spans across building high frequency trading systems. This dynamic trio brought over 40 years worth of financial experience to the project to provide investors and traders with access to the global market using only Bitcoin. BitMex incorporated in Seychelles and is unregulated in any jurisdiction at present.

BitMEX, short for Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange, takes inspiration from the CME group which is also known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

At the time of writing BitMEX has surpassed all competitor exchanges with its daily trading volume exceeding $1.2 billion dollars (~200,000 BTC).

The majority of cryptocurrency exchanges accept a wide range of digital assets for making deposits into the hot wallet however BitMEX currently only allows Bitcoin. However this has little impact on its user base as it is targeted more at professional traders with financial experience. The products BitMEX offers are based around derivative trading, more specifically Bitcoin futures, perpetual contracts and BitMEX UP and BitMEX down contracts.

In short derivative trading is an agreement between two separate parties that requires one party to purchase the underlying asset (Bitcoin) and the other to sell that asset on a date in the future. This doesn’t have to be tied to a physical products but for the example below it is to make understanding the concept easier.

The best way to explain Bitcoin futures is using common day to day grocery shopping. If I gave you $20 dollars for 100 eggs ( Yup! I love eggs 🙂 ) the transaction is immediately settled, but with a futures contract the settlement is agreed at a specific time in the future for a set amount meaning two elements are the price and date of delivery.

For example a humble egg farmer may be worried that the egg consumption could drop or rise in the future for any reason and thus could take advantage of this by locking the price with the buyer which means a more financially stable company. The other party would agree to this price as they may think the egg price could change in their favour determined on the type of bet. Fast forward to the future, let’s say the consumer demand for eggs rocketed due to a health trend, this might mean the price of eggs drops as sellers try to shift as many eggs as possible, the farmer is not affected by this as he locked in the price with a futures contract.

The above example of a futures contract works exactly the same but for Bitcoin, it could be based on rumour, hearsay, demand, news, regulation or anything that affects the price of Bitcoin. It essentially opens an arena for various parties to bet on the outcome based on speculation.

How to Sign Up to BitMEX

To setup an account with BitMEX, users need to register on the website by providing an email address, password, country of residence and full name. Once you have activated the account through email you can proceed with trading as no KYC or AML checks are required to deposit or withdraw funds.

BitMEX currently does not allow traders from the United States to register as it does not function within the legal framework. This is not necessarily a bad thing but could be down to a number of factors such as over zealous regulations by the SEC. It has been noted on social media that people in the US are bypassing the IP checks with a VPN.

How to Use BitMEX

Users can trade a wide variety of digital assets including Bitcoin, Cardano, Tron, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple cryptocurrencies against fiat currencies such as Chinese Yuan, US Dollar and Japanese Yen.

Unfortunately if you are new to financial trading then BitMEX will feel overwhelming but for those who have dabbled with financial instruments before it is easy to get to grips with. We do not recommend using BitMEX as a beginner unless you are very well versed in leverage trading.

All trading instruments can be found by clicking the trade tab once logged in.

To open an orderbook click as specific asset such as Bitcoin from the top pane, this will display the most recent trades in the right hand side tab followed by the trading chart and orderbook to the left. The charts can be used to analyse historical trading data.

You will also notice in the top right a customise button which allows the user to choose their viewing preferences with full control of the orderbook widget, depth chart, price chart, recent trades and positions & open orders. The trading chart data is fed directly from TradingView which is a recognised and trusted 3rd party data platform.

When a user places a trade on the BitMex platform it can be viewed in the trading interface with the option to view active and filled orders including the stops which are in place. All active orders can be canceled by the user at any point with the analysis of whether it is in red or black

Futures and Swaps

As previously explained a Bitcoin futures contract will enable a user to sell or buy Bitcoin in the future at a predetermined price. Users can leverage up to 100x on these contracts.

Perpetual swaps are not dissimilar to bitcoin futures other than that they have no settlement or expiry date but they trade along with the underlying reference Index Price whereas futures diverge from the Index price.

Prediction based Binary contracts can be also traded but they settle at 0 or 100 and designed for making a bet on any given event. Binary contracts are traded with zero leverage, a 0.25% taker fee, a, 0% maker fee and 0.25% settlement fee.

Leverage

BitMEX also enables traders to margin trade where positions can be leveraged by placing orders larger than the users current balance which could lead to a higher profit.

However margin trading can be extremely dangerous for inexperienced traders as all profits can be quickly liquidated, meaning the amount of money in their wallet will be taken.

The maximum leverage a user can take out is 1:100 which is much greater than other exchanges who sit at 1:20

BitMEX Fees

For Perpetual contrats BitMex has a 00x leverage, -0.00250% maker fee, 0.0750% taker fee, 0.0100% long funding, short funding fee of -0.0100% with a funding interval of every 8 hours.

The traditional futures fees for all tradable assets have a similar maker fee from -0.0250% – -0.0500%, although the leverage varies from 20x for example with Tron right up to 100x with Ethereum.

Deposits and Withdrawals

At present BitMex does not charge fees on withdrawals or deposits. When a user withdraws Bitcoin, the minimum network fee is set automatically based on the blockchain load which is currently low.

Users can withdraw and deposit Bitcoin at their leisure with no limits although the minimal deposit is 0.001 BTC.

To withdraw or deposit, a QR coded address is displayed when clicking the “account” tab along the top pane.

Although a user can withdraw Bitcoin at anytime, BitMEX has implemented a cut off time set at 13:00 UTC which means if you process a withdrawal after that it will be completed the next working day. This has been designed to stop automated deposits and withdrawals by bots or hackers on the hot wallet and provides the staff with sufficient time to cancel any fraudulent withdrawals.

Is BitMEX Safe?

BitMEX states on its website that it does not compromise security for convenience with their ethos based on rigorous and well tested security measures to make the platform bullet proof.

The deposit and withdrawal system is multisignature which means each time this processes is initiated its then checked by the majority of BitMex partners to ensures its legitimacy. By using multisignature it prevents users funds from being accessed by a hacker if they manage to compromise the hosting server or database.

The BitMEX trading engines uses kdb+ which is a database and toolset used by major banks and other high speed financial trading platforms.

PGP encryption is used for all communication across the board

BitMEX Customer Support

BitMEX runs a mixture of support and contact methods including IRC, Reddit, Twitter, support tickets and email contact for dealing with customer enquiries 24/7 which has often been praised as responsive on reddit.

Customers can also access an extensive frequently asked questions section for basic enquiries they may have.

Conclusion

BitMEX has an established following among traditional Wall Street traders who are familiar with margin trading. The platform is not designed or marketed towards beginners who simply want to purchase Bitcoin. In fact this is not even possible at the moment as you must own/ deposit Bitcoin before using the platform. So if you are looking to trade with futures and take advantage of the 100x margin, BitMEX is for you!

We advise everyone to start with a small trade due to the high potential losses which can occur with the type of trading on offer.

Users with no prior trading experience whom are simply looking to buy Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies we recommend stepping away from BitMEX, you may want to read our review on the Binance exchange which is more user friendly for beginners.

Pro’s

• Great for experienced traders
• Can leverage 100x
• Fast trading engine

Con’s

• Hard to use for new traders
• Can loose funds quite easily if not familiar with leverage trading
• Controls a large portion of the market

Thanks for reading our BitMEX review, if you would like to visit the website for more information please visit: https://www.bitmex.com or check out the Reddit for any community support queries here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitMEX/

Tap n Go (TAP) has partnered with Transact Payments Limited (TPL) to provide the Tap Prepaid Mastercard® that will allow customers to convert Crypto Assets held with TAP for spending wherever Mastercard is accepted.

The TAP accounts with multiple crypto and fiat wallets and will have access to real time crypto trading with numerous exchanges, all assets are held securely in multi signatory “cold storage” wallets or electronic money client accounts.

Tap n Go have applied to the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission for a DLT licence which is currently under review.

Arsen Torosian CEO of TAP commented: “the launch of TAP has been in the making for a number of years, our partnership with TPL for our provision of the TAP Prepaid Mastercard was the final piece of our vision. We are delighted to have TPL as our partner for this product”

Kriya Patel, MD of TNL commented: “TPL are delighted to be supporting the TAP Prepaid Mastercard project and look forward to continuing to work with such an initiative partner like TAP with the roll out of their in-demand solution”.

We think these altcoins should be part of your 2019 investment portfolio

Sia

The cloud storage industry is currently dominated by DropBox, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. These companies have taken the lion’s share of customers in the file hosting space however this is very likely to change. A small and fairly unknown blockchain startup going by the name of Sia aims to end this monopoly by redefining the technology and processes behind cloud storage.

The current methods of storage rely on massive data centres and server farms to both store and retrieve data. This centralised approach creates a number of issues. For example:

Control – One company having full control over your data.

Ownership – Who owns your data and how will they use it, sell it and profit off of it.

Security – Centralisation means bugs, malpractice and hackers can target very specific companies and infrastructure. In fact DropBox lost 68 customer million passwords not so long ago and for a short period of time and any user could access the data of other users at will.

Scalability – Each organisation needs to operate massive data centres to fulfill the storage and processing needs.

As these companies become even bigger the issues above become compounded.

The blockchain technology behind Sia is completely new for the industry and takes a more decentralised approach to solve the issues above.

When a customer uploads a file to the network it is automatically encrypted and split up into hundreds of tiny pieces. Only the uploader has the private keys to decrypt and view this data. All these encrypted pieces of data are then uploaded across many hosts and duplicated for impeccable redundancy.

With Sia storage is no longer controlled or owned by a company. Instead anyone can become a file hoster by leasing spare unused hard drive space to store encrypted data. File hosters and uploaders create a sort of digital handshake called a ‘smart contract’ which manages the storing of data between the two parties and pays the renter for the hard drive being used by the uploader.

With Sia clearly solving very real storage issues and making great progress with the project we believe it is a great time to invest in the project.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 113,000 Sia.

Ripple

Ripple takes blockchain technology and applies it to the traditional banking sector, resulting in trustworthy, verified, scalable, instant and cheap banking transactions.

For example the current Faster Payments banking service is an initiative between several banks to reduce the time of transfers between registered bank accounts. However transfers outside of that scheme take much longer and are routed through third party intermediaries. This process is not only risky but also labour and time intensive. Ripple solves these problems.

At the time of writing over 100 banks across the globe are trialling Ripple’s blockchain technology. Some of these banks include Santander, UniCredit and most recently the world’s largest Islamic bank, Al Rajhi Bank.

We think the technology behind Ripple will likely become the financial industry standard in the not too distant future.

Ripple has been within the top ten 24 hour volume across all cryptocurrencies and assets for several months now and it’s XRP currency has reached highs of $0.40.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 5,400 Ripple.

Stratis

The Microsoft backed Stratis platform is known as the C# equivalent to Ethereum. It enables programmers to produce decentralised, smart contract based apps very quickly and easily using a tried and tested programming language that has stood the test of time.

This opens it up to an already massive developer base with little to no additional learning required, giving it a clear edge over Ethereum.

Stratis is also poised to release its long awaited TumbleBit service and smart contracts in Q3 of this year and is developing the “Breeze Wallet”, a wallet feature that aims to boost privacy of both Bitcoin and Stratis users.

In the last month Stratis saw significant highs followed by a very quick drop. The coin reached all time highs of $11 but currently trades at $3. This is an ideal opportunity to buy in whilst the price is still low.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 160 Stratis.

Golem

Golem is on track to becoming the world’s first decentralised supercomputer. It utilizes the Ethereum blockchain to harness the unused/ idle power of millions of connected resources and turns it into sellable computing power.

Many companies and individuals require a service like this and currently have resort to small scale farms that can take days to process/ render and cost a small fortune.

For example games developers, film studios, data mining operations and medical researchers have to use vast amounts of processing power to complete very specific tasks. With Golem all these companies will have an always accessible, affordable supercomputer at their fingertips.

With its vast processing power Golem can also be used for making predictions across different industries such as betting, stock markets and even environmental changes.

Anyone with a computer can lease their unused processing power and in return get paid in GNT tokens. These tokens can be re-used, transferred to an exchange for trading or sold for more traditional currencies such as USD/GBP.

When taking a step back and assessing Golems end goal it offers a very unique investment opportunity not seen with any other project. It has many real world, life changing uses and the possibilities are endless.

Sitting at just $0.23 cents Golem is criminally cheap right now.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 3,500 Golem.

Monero

Monero is somewhat of a crypto veteran. The coin doesn’t mince its words and does one thing, albeit extremely well. It is currently the most secure and private coin on the market.

Anyone looking to make a safe long term investment would be wise to invest in it. The coin is seen as the ‘gold standard’ for privacy conscious users looking to stay permanently in the shadows. In fact Monero is in the top 5 most used cryptocurrencies for day to day purchases and traded across the Dark Web making it one of the few coins that is actually used as a currency.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 24 Monero.

Verge

Verge is an interesting (and possibly controversial) entry.

Like Monero it is aimed at users who take privacy seriously and combines Tor and i2p technologies to increase blockchain anonymity.

The project has one of the most active communities with a huge development team regularly ticking off new and exciting features on the roadmap. In June alone Seven major new features were pushed live.

Everything from Tor based Android wallets to RSK Smart Contracts are planned for July making this coin one to watch, especially at its current price. Despite recent price volatility the project is moving at a very quick pace and we believe this will be reflected in its price very soon.

So that’s it! There are many other projects we would have liked to add and others that ‘sound great’ (ICO frenzy anyone!!). As these projects mature and show their progress they will also be assessed and our verdicts shared. Good luck.

A $1,000 investment today would get you 324,000 Verge.

It was an inevitable ending to the rumors and speculations about the two companies both using the name Alibaba. These two companies namely Alibaba Group and Alibabacoin Foundation which now calls themselves ABBC Foundation has gone through a series of battles regarding the rights for Alibabacoin.

Last year, a new company based in Belarus and Dubai made a website called alibabacoinfoundation.com and conducted an ICO that accepted investment for developing Alibabacoin. They argued that Alibaba is a common and native name in the Middle East. While that’s true, Alibaba Group filed a lawsuit based in the US, fighting for the trademark of Alibabacoin.

This lawsuit went on for a long time and has been on the headlines for a while. But everything comes to an end. The two companies are now going for a “worldwide settlement” as they recently mentioned in an announcement. In the announcement, it was said that Alibabacoin will belong to Alibaba Group exclusively and will not be used anymore by ABBC Foundation. This means that Alibaba Group now controls and owns “Alibabacoin”.

This move is perceived and interpreted by many as a positive step toward a developing and more amiable relationship between the two companies. It’s not a secret that Alibaba.com is one of the biggest e-commerce players in the world. On the other hand, ABBC Foundation expressed their interest on collaborating with online shopping malls. In an article published in CCN, ABBC Foundation announced a future goal that ABBC will be used in large internet shopping malls around the world. In the announcement, it was mentioned that “Jason Daniel Paul Philip, CEO of ABBC Foundation…announced that ABBC can be used as payment in 30 different most famous shopping malls around the world.”

If it ends well with these two companies, they may be able to come into an understanding of mutual benefit involved should they decide to collaborate in the future. While there is no confirmed news of collaboration, there is a distinct possibility of this future developments now that “Alibabacoin” belongs to Alibaba Group.

Recap, a privacy-focused accounting software platform for cryptocurrency has secured a sizeable grant from Innovate UK to help launch its services worldwide.

Recap has been granted £135,136 as a winner of the Transforming accountancy, insurance and legal services with AI and data competition. The funding was provided through the Government’s modern industrial strategy by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Recap is an encrypted, bespoke platform which allows those with complex cryptocurrency portfolios to track, manage and strategise by bringing all the information into one platform. One of its key features is to track the large numbers of taxable transactions many investors in cryptocurrencies incur, sometimes on a per second basis.

Co-founder and Director Daniel Howitt said: “It’s exciting times here at Recap, we have an ambitious backlog of work to deliver by March. The US tax deadline for the 2018 tax year closes mid-April. We want Recap to be available way ahead of this deadline, meaning we need to internationalise the product, design and build a US capital gains tax engine and also fully monetise the product so we can start collecting annual subscription revenue.

“The US launch comes off the back of our successful private beta launch to early adopters in the UK.”

The fintech start-up, based in the East Midlands and founded by Directors Daniel Howitt and Ben Shepheard and is the first platform of its kind in the UK and is supported by software experts Selenity and chartered accountants Wright Vigar.

Daniel added: “Our seed raise of £150,000 will allow us to meet the match funding requirement of our £135,000 grant to give us £280,000 investment.

“These funds will allow us to develop our transaction matching IP, release our 1.0.0 version of the product and actively market the platform in the UK and US.

Recap is currently raising a £150,000 seed round led by a cryptocurrency investor and customer of Recap.

To find out more, visit the website here: www.recap.io

The online gaming industry is one of the biggest success stories of the last two decades. Starting out at nothing more than a handful of rudimentary sites at the end of the nineties, online casino gaming alone is now worth upwards of $51 billion/£39.5 billion. Naturally, as the industry has become more lucrative, technology, tastes and gaming options have evolved. Indeed, when you compare early online gaming to today’s emerging blockchain-based creations, things have changed markedly.

Building the Foundations of Online Gaming

If we go back to 1999, Playtech was one of the first developers to harness the power of random number generator (RNG) software. Following the example set by Microgaming in 19995, Playtech’s developers found that complex algorithms could recreate random scenarios. With technology able to ensure a fair result, the company set about developing some of the earliest online casino games. Two decades later, this technology still forms the basis of all online casino games. Whatever title you select inside https://games.paddypower.com/c/slots, the underlying RNG technology will be the same as it was back in 1999. Yes, it will have been refined. However, the fundamental principles are still in place, meaning that everything from Electric Tiger to Gold Frenzy are fair.

From this base, online gaming has cherrypicked ideas and innovations from across the gaming industry at large. For example, almost all online bingo sites now have chat facilities, emojis and more. Essentially borrowing from https://www.facebook.com/games/, bingo sites now offer the same social experience as Words with Friends or 8 Ball Pool. Beyond socialisation features, live streams have become popular. Taking inspiration from https://www.twitch.tv/ and other streaming platforms, developers have been able to create live gaming experience. By combining webcams with RFID technology, players can now interact with real dealers hosting real games inside specially designed studios.

Can Blockchains Decentralise Casino Gaming?

The question is, how will online gaming evolve with the help of blockchain technology? Visit https://www.cryptokitties.co/ and you’ll start to get an insight into the direction blockchain gaming is going. Although an early attempt to utilise decentralised technology for recreational purposes, Axiom Zen’s Cryptokitties has one interesting feature that could be used to improve player safety. As part of the game, each Cryptokitty is represented by a non-fungible ERC-721 token. This allows ownership of the virtual cat to be tracked via Ethereum’s smart contract system. Applying this idea to online gaming, developers could use it to track player IDs. On the one hand, this would reduce the risk of fraud as it would be easier to track and control transactions between players and between players and the casino. Additionally, this technology could be used to create a multifaceted casino ecosystem.

In today’s online gaming community, players have to create individual accounts. By tracking players in the same way Cryptokitties are tracked, it could be possible to bridge the gaps. In other words, players would create a central account which could then be used to access multiple sites. As it stands, many of the leading brands are part of a larger network. Therefore, with this technology, it could be possible to link players across all sites within the network. By marking each account with an ERC-721 token, everything from a player’s personal details to their account balance and playing preferences would become decentralised (i.e. not held by one site). While this would require cooperation and communication between casino brands, the fact networks already exist suggests it could work. Indeed, if online casinos were able to take something from Cryptokitties, it would give players more flexibility, choice and, ultimately, provide a more entertaining experience.