Bitfinex and Ethfinex to Complete Data Migration to Dedicated Bare-Metal Servers on January 7th 2019

The last stage of the migration managed will take Bitfinex and Ethfinex offline for up to seven hours.

On Monday 7th January 2019 (time to be confirmed), Bitfinex and Ethfinex will be offline for a duration between three to seven hours as iFinex completes the final stage of its data migration to dedicated bare-metal servers.

Aided by Market Synergy (announced earlier this year), iFinex is switching from AWS cloud to a self-designed infrastructure hosted in a Swiss data centre in the heart of Crypto Valley. iFinex will have its own dedicated servers and has selected premium hardware that is the best suited to high volume trading.

The last stage in this process necessitates taking iFinex trading platforms offline, meaning that Bitfinex and Ethfinex account holders will be unable to trade or access their wallets during the transition.

Why we are doing this

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 modelled 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.

The immediate benefits of the new, dedicated bare-metal server model will include:

1. Increased Speed

Thanks to the use of carefully selected, dedicated hardware and new order submission gateways, performance will be up to 2x faster, dependent on how far traders’ servers are located from the new datacenter.

Plus, in a market leading model facilitated by Market Synergy, Bitfinex and Ethfinex will now offer cross-connectivity and co-location to professional trading companies, giving much faster access and increasing speed from 60–100ms to 5–15ms. (The FIX feed or ISP link to Bitfinex’s digital asset gateway is for professional traders and institutional firms. For further information, please contact info@marketsynergy.ch).

This is just the first step in making Bitfinex and Ethfinex the fastest exchanges in the industry, with further developments scheduled throughout 2019.

2. Advanced Security

Bitfinex and Ethfinex already have the most security features in place of any exchange, including 2FA, IP and address whitelisting, withdrawal locking, in addition to a series of confirmation steps for all actions on site. These dedicated bare-metal servers will be inherently more secure, being self-hosted and running on dedicated custom hardware as opposed to cloud-based and reliant on a third-party service.

Having complete control of our core infrastructure also enables iFinex to control the exact scope and timing of all future hardware and software upgrades, which is particularly significant in a borderless and 24/7 industry.

Additionally, through Market Synergy operations the servers will be video and movement surveilled 24/7 with military grade access to the datacenter.

What the downtime means for traders

Bitfinex and Ethfinex trading platforms will be down for up to seven hours. Account holders will not be able to access their wallets, and all features across both platforms will be offline for the duration of the upgrade.

Traders are not required to take any actions:

All funds will remain safe and unaffected throughout the entirety of the migration and will not be at risk at any point throughout the update. Furthermore, iFinex will be using only bare-metal, fully-owned, dedicated servers to run the nodes for blockchains, giving additional security.

No orders will be executed during downtime. All open orders will be kept (regardless of price movements) and resume once the platform is back online.

Users will not be liquidated during downtime. However, traders should be aware that if the price moves significantly during this time, they are at risk of liquidation as soon as the platform is reopened and should therefore take necessary precautions.

We kindly ask all traders to review their margin requirements and assess the risk of market movement on their open margin positions before entering the maintenance window.

Whilst the migration is scheduled to take place on January 7th, placing our traders’ best interests at the forefront, this date will be contingent on market conditions. If the market is deemed too volatile on January 7th, the migration will be postponed to a day of more typical movements to protect our traders.

We appreciate that up to seven hours is a significant length of time in digital asset trading, and we promise we have taken every measure to make this transition as smooth and quick as possible, without compromising on safety or quality.

We will be here to assist with any queries now and in the lead up to the data migration, and please refer here for our specific FAQ. On the day of the migration, we will regularly update our status page with our progress, and let our users know 5 minutes before the platform re-opens. Trading will start 5 minutes after the platform is accessible again.

And as always, you can get in touch with our dedicated support team here.

We hope you are as excited about this transformative step in our journey as we are.

The Bitfinex Team