In late November 2014, a new exchange was born. In its short lifetime, Bitmex has become very popular among Bitcoin and crypto traders and has an important role affecting the Bitcoin trade ecosystem worldwide.
Unlike other crypto margin trading exchanges, Bitmex offers leverage trading of up to 1:100. In a volatile market such as the crypto market, many speculative traders use margin trading to leverage their trade and also for hedging reasons.
For the special occasion, we’ve picked some interesting facts about the leading exchange. We wish Bitmex a happy birthday and many more birthdays to come!
Arthur Hayes, the co-founder, and CEO of BitMex posted a “blessing tweet” celebrating that ETH had gone below $100. Based on Hayes’ past posts he seems to have negative opinion of Ether. In a blog post, a few months ago, he called ETH “a shitcoin along with USD.”
Hayes also urged users to short ETH in the BitMex chat (known as “Trollbox”). This may be one of the reasons why BitMex is so popular in today’s bear market. You can actually short Bitcoin and the major altcoins on the exchange, and the major difference between BitMex and most cryptocurrency exchanges is that the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange is offering its users options trading instead of trading BTC and altcoins.
Two mother fucking digits! #Ether pic.twitter.com/5GQAPNUGYa
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) November 25, 2018
Unlike other exchanges, Bitmex offers futures trading for multiple cryptocurrency contracts, but, it’s based on your Bitcoin balance. As of now, BitMex does not deal with any FIAT currencies or even stable coins such as Tether. And it might stay that way for some good regulatory reasons.
While other exchanges, such as Binance, belong to the altcoins, Bitmex belongs to the speculative trading around Bitcoin.
As mentioned, Bitmex lets its users leverage their trade to up to 1:100 margin. In bear markets like the current one, shorting gives traders a very important opportunity to keep their profits by hedging and earning from improving positions against Bitcoin.
Yes, despite the fact we are all HODLers, declines are part of the game: and that’s the part of Bitmex that tops the number 1 leading exchange by volume while the market has an extreme level of volatility.
In September 2018, BitMex was scheduled for maintenance. In the short hour of being offline, Bitcoin went up from $6,400 to $7,200 and crashed after a couple of hours back to $6,250. What comes fast goes fast.
According to experts, the real reason behind this was BitMex’s maintenance as the exchange went back online while Bitcoin was $6,800 and immediately had to liquidate lots of open short positions. This effectively created a massive short squeeze and sent Bitcoin $400 more, to a high of $7,200. So, based on this, expect BTC price manipulations like this when the BitMex is in “repair mode.”
We can’t stay apathetic to the nice resume of the founding team. While Hayes, the CEO, graduated from the Wharton School of Business, he was working for Deutsche Bank and Citibank as a market-maker. Ben Delo, CFO, graduated from the University of Oxford with a Masters and First Class Honours in Mathematics and Computer Science. He has over ten years experience developing high-frequency trading systems for companies such as J.P. Morgan and IBM.
The third angle is the CTO Samuel Reed who, despite his age, has served as the CTO of two technology companies – Tixelated and Global Brand Solutions.
But it’s not only about the founding guys, Bitmex recently tapped Angelina Kwan, Former HKEX Executive, to Head Its Compliance Affairs. It’s not about the company; it’s the people.