There was a lot of excitement about a week ago regarding Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara saying that he can imagine a day when USD pairs are featured on Bittrex. This happened while Shihara was on the Unikrn Podcast and was met by almost overwhelming support by retail investors on various message boards and Twitter. However, a closer look at the details shows that this information is probably bad news for 80% of retail investors, at least those who want to trade on Bittrex and possibly other U.S. exchanges.

First off, he didn’t even say that USD pairs are in the works. He says he “imagines” a day when that is a reality. So basically, no date, nothing concrete, he just imagines it happening one day. Which doesn’t really tell us much, as I imagine flying cars one day, but that doesn’t mean it’s happening next month.

Next, as you may or may not know, Bittrex is STILL not even accepting new retail customers to sign up. In fact, its been about 2 months since they accepted new sign ups and they haven’t even given a date for when it will open back up. The reason they gave for closing new sign ups was the lack of support personal. But they said their total goal of new hires of “support contractors” was 20. As we know, they had backlogs of support issues going back months. I’m not sure if adding 20 people is enough, and his use of the word “contractors” makes it seem they are outsourced.







But what this brings up is the next and larger issue. The low number of new support hires goes to show that Bittrex has no intention of taking on more retail investors. In fact, Shihara even admitted as much. He said he doesn’t want to cater to retail investors at all and instead wants be an exchange only for institutions. He mentioned trade minimums, he didn’t give a dollar amount, but if they have USD pairs, it would probably be at least $25K to be left on the exchange if you wanted to actively trade.

So taking all of this in, it seems that small time retail investors will not be allowed to use Bittrex. Not only that, it seems pretty clear that existing smaller investors will eventually have their accounts closed and be asked to leave before USD pairs are introduced.

So if you had plans of trading USD pairs on Bittrex, there is a good chance you don’t qualify and they don’t even want you if you are a young retail investor. That’s not my opinion, that’s the words of the CEO himself. So based on that, I’m not sure why there was so much excitement around the announcement about USD pairs. If you look closer, it just shows how a U.S. exchange is making it harder for the average person to get involved in crypto investing, which is not good for the market. One of the things that helped fuel the recent bull run is that anyone could get involved in crypto trading with a few hundred bucks, it was accessible to everybody. But now it looks like Bittrex wants to change that.