Bitmex Accused of Manipulating Ethereum’s Price

A crypto trading exchange with eye-watering margins of 100x has angered ethereans after Bitmex’s CEO, Arthur Hayes, appeared to tell his customers, under an official Bitmex account, to short eth.

To punt on something can have many meanings, including to bet on something or to kick something.

Hayes then goes on to use some very colorful and highly professional language in contrast to his public tweet which said:

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

No punting here, but to all the Bitmex customers, which are automatically subscribed to a “newsletter,” he told them eth is “a double digit” colorful coin.

In other words, Bitmex hates ethereum 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 futures, while they appear to offer EOS, BCH, Cardano and a number of other crypto futures. It appears the only perpetual 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.

They are unregulated, with no oversight or any accountability. Moreover, they apply no identification requirements yet claim US customers can not trade on the exchange. Arthur Hayes himself is, however, American and appears on American TV studios, which means he is currently residing in USA and is obviously using Bitmex as shown by the screenshot above. 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.”

It is probable the vast majority of US customers are from America and it is probable Bitmex is fully aware of it, with the exchange only rising in volumes after they were effectively the only margin trading option left following the closure of OKCoin and Huobi during September last year.

OKCoin has now come back as OKEx, as has Huobi. OKEx and Huobi are reasonably professional trading exchanges, with OKEx having no artificial spread and significant liquidity in contrast to Bitmex which can be quite expensive due to their spreads.

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 perpetual 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.

Now there are more options in OKEx and Huobi, but those bureaucrats talk all day about protecting investors while at the same time restricting investors’ options.

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