News Competition Emerges as BitMEX Goes Mum amidst CFTC Probe

BitMEX, the world’s leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, is looking at the prospects of losing its top position to the emerging competition.

Gone With The Wind

The Seychelles firm took a vow of silence shortly after its name popped up in a regulatory probe. Last month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) allegedly sent letters to BitMEX for offering services to US customers without obtaining a license. The report visibly prompted the firm’s clientele into panic-withdrawing their cryptocurrencies. As of July 24, BitMEX had withdrawn $125 million worth of money off its cold storage.

Effective 15 July 2019 at 15:15 UTC, BitMEX will reintroduce Kraken into its indices following the resumption of trading on Kraken. See our blog for details: https://t.co/4EogEtB0YN — BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) July 15, 2019

The last BitMEX tweet was on July 15, 2019.

BitMEX Competition

The continued distrust fuelled by an aggressive silence from BitMEX and its top executives on the CFTC matter is appearing to cost the exchange its top spot. Over the past few weeks, news platforms are emerging from all directions that offer similar cryptocurrency derivatives solutions. The most renowned is the one by Coinbase. The US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange announced Blade, which would be live in about three weeks from this time of writing. Coinbase’ latest venture also raised a $4.3 million funding from top Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

That marks one of the first alarm bells getting sent towards the BitMEX team. ‘Blade‘ threatens to cut away a good portion of BitMEX’s clientele, partially because its likely to get a regulatory blessing, and offers 150x leverage on BTC/USD and BTC/KRW trades. BitMEX, on the other hand, continues to run its business while providing a 100x leveraging option under a doubtfully regulated environment.

Blade aside, BitMEX is also taking the competitive heat from StormGain, a margin trading exchange which boasts of 100x multiplier trading without needing users to KYC themselves. Then, some firms were already in the game but were too little to get noticed before the $4 billion volume size of BitMEX. PrimeXBT, for instance, is competing with the Seychelles exchange with its $100 million worth of daily volume and – again – 100x leverage solutions.

Top cryptocurrency exchange Binance and financial trading firm eToro offer similar crypto derivatives solutions, but their leverages remain dwarfed.

The Arthur Hayes Returns

BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes, who debated noted economist Nouriel Roubini right before he took a break from Twitter, has reappeared on social media, meanwhile. He appears to be travelling and promises to return to work in September. But to what Hayes would return is still something one cannot predict: a competitively-beaten BitMEX, arguably?

But you have to give in to Hayes for perfectly imitating Kate Winslet’s impression from Titanic (pun intended).

You can hate me now, but I won’t stop now pic.twitter.com/WLbBQx5Yea — Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) August 8, 2019

Do you think Bitmex will be overtaken by new competition? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!



Images via Shutterstock, Twitter @Cryptohayes, @Coinmarketshare, @BitMEXdotcom