The team at both Bitfinex and Ethfinex has announced that they plan a scheduled ‘shutdown’ on the 7th of January 2019, to facilitate the final stages of a currently ongoing data migration to dedicated bare-metal servers. The exact timing is yet to be announced by the team at iFinex but the two exchanges will go offline for a duration of between three and seven hours.

Why the Migration?

The parent company of both Bitfinex and Ethfinex – iFinex – is switching from AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud to self-designed infrastructure hosted in a data center at the heart of the Crypto Valley in Switzerland. iFinex has selected premium hardware for its dedicated servers that will optimized to handle high volume trading.

What remains now, is the the last stage to complete the process of migrating data to the new servers. The team explained via the announcement, why they are migrating to the new servers:

From superior quality APIs, to margin trading and breadth of order types, iFinex are constantly innovating to provide the most sophisticated trading platform in the market. Data migration to dedicated bare-metal servers is atypical in our industry, and we have modeled our approach on traditional stock exchange operations. It has been a considerable undertaking, but one we felt was integral to provide a service up to the standard that professional traders are used to in other sectors.

Benefits of the New Dedicated Bare-Metal Servers

Migrating to the new servers will provide the following benefits:

Increased speed – performance will be 2x faster but dependent on how far the traders’ servers are located from the new data-center

– performance will be 2x faster but dependent on how far the traders’ servers are located from the new data-center Advanced security – the dedicated bare-metal servers will be more secure, self-hosted thus eliminating any third-party service. Through a partnership with Market Synergy, the servers will be video and movement monitored 24/7 all year round, with military grade access to the data center

Effects on the Downtime for the Trader

During the data migration at Bitfinex and Ethfinex, traders will not be able to access the trading platforms. All features on the platforms will be offline during the upgrade.

Funds will however be safe and unaffected. No orders will be executed and any open orders will be kept as is. The open orders will resume as soon as the platforms are back online.

Traders to Plan Ahead to Avoid Liquidations Due to Price Movements during the 3 – 7 Hours

The team at the exchanges went on to clarify that no trades will be liquidation during the downtime.

However, due to significant price movements in the crypto markets during the 3 – 7 hours time period, traders are advised to take necessary precautions ahead of time to avoid liquidations.

What are your thoughts on Bitfinex and Ethfinex migrating their data to dedicated servers in Switzerland? Please let us know in the comment section below.