BitMEX Accused of Manipulating Ethereum’s Price

By Ravindra Chagetha

BitMEX a crypto trading exchange with up to 100x leverage is a fast-growing, low fees exchanges. Arthur Hayes, Bitmex’s CEO has upset the Ethereans by stating under an official Bitmex account that they would not need to use Ethereum for trading.

Hayes communicated with its user via a tweet which said:

“50x leveraged ETHUSD perpetual swap is now live! Trade using only Bitcoin, you never have to touch Ether or USD.”

He told to all the Bitmex customers, which are automatically subscribed to a “newsletter,” ETH is “a double-digit”colourful coin. One might incur to this that BitMEX is not a big fan of ETH and as of today, Bitmex is apparently handling $3 billion in trading volumes for the ETH/USD perpetual swap. A number we don’t really believe.

You can not bet in the ETH/USD pair with ETH or USD, but only with bitcoin. They have no ETH future while they appear to offer EOS, BCH, Cardano and a number of other crypto futures. It appears the only persistent swap is for ETH.

The exchange, moreover, has some significant spread between the buy and sell price orders, with it unclear whether BitMEX trades against its own customers. Arthur Hayes being an American and appears on American TV studios, are unregulated with no oversight or any accountability. They do not have any identification requirements yet claim US customers can not trade on the exchange.

BitMEX says: “Trading access to or holding positions on BitMEX is prohibited for any person that is located in or a resident of the United States of America, Québec (Canada), Cuba, Crimea and Sevastopol, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, or any other jurisdiction where the services offered by BitMEX are restricted. If it is determined that any BitMEX trading participant has given false representations as to their location or place of residence, BitMEX reserves the right to close any of their accounts immediately and to liquidate any open positions.”

After the closure of OKCoin and Huobi during September last year they were effectively the only margin trading option left. The majority of customers are from America and it is probable BitMEX is fully aware of it.

OKEx, moreover, offers proper ETH futures, with 20x margins, as it does for bitcoin and a number of other cryptos, in contrast to BitMEX’s weird persistent swap.

Which means now there is again an alternative to BitMEX’s huge spreads, but really regulators are to blame here for their failure to green-light regulated futures provided by crypto exchanges, such as Gdax. A failure which effectively for a time forced the market to have no option but to deal with the Bitmex clown.

While there are more options in OKEx and Huobi, but they have their own agenda of protecting investors while simultaneously restricting investor’s options.

Ravindra Chagetha

His interests and the desire to learn something new cannot be neglected as he is always keen to learn new things.

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