BitMEX

K

King Sisyphus

Quick question for those that have experience with BitMEX.

I'm a professional trader (futures mainly) and have been experimenting with a bit of money on their platform. Nothing huge, only $100k clips.

I have to say I'm really not impressed so far.

Just tried to get long at 11477.5 for what I predict to be the start of the next leg up, and the entire platform locked up. Web UI froze, the TradingView charts froze...

When the UI eventually unfroze I tried to cross the spread with a marketable limit order. This was rejected due to a "system overload".

I've read a lot of the commentary online about ShitMEX (as it appears to be known) and these lockups appear to be a regular occurance at key levels.

Would be grateful for any thoughts from others with more experience on the crypto platforms than myself. Is BitMEX really a waste of time for pros?
 
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Not a waste of time if you're arbing or exclusively resting limit orders, the fees on market orders are quite high though. You can also set up a Bitmex connection with TT, that won't get around the system lockup issues but being able to use the DOM and build custom spreads puts you ahead of a lot of the 'customers' on Bitmex.

I'm no professional crypto trader but I would be quoting many levels deep on bitmex and be monitoring/hedging on other high volume exchanges to keep a handle on whatever is happening during a bitmex freeze event. I wonder if you could use bitmex freezes as a momentum indicator to trade on other venues...
 
trade_canada said:
Not a waste of time if you're arbing or exclusively resting limit orders, the fees on market orders are quite high though. You can also set up a Bitmex connection with TT, that won't get around the system lockup issues but being able to use the DOM and build custom spreads puts you ahead of a lot of the 'customers' on Bitmex.

I'm no professional crypto trader but I would be quoting many levels deep on bitmex and be monitoring/hedging on other high volume exchanges to keep a handle on whatever is happening during a bitmex freeze event. I wonder if you could use bitmex freezes as a momentum indicator to trade on other venues...
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Thanks for the insight. I'm not really interested in arbing/spreading. IMHO the real money is in directional plays, and the structure in XBT market behaviour is honestly the easiest to read I have ever seen. It's almost like clockwork.

If a newbie wants to understand how markets really work look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin has practically zero fundamentals and there are no commercials involved. It's pretty much 100% speculative and (crucially) a high proportion of the players are still uninformed retail. And boy are the amateurs getting raped by the pros.

The cynic in me calls bullshit on these BitMEX platform lockups. The tech is already there to build a matching engine that can handle the throughput. I mean...Jesus wept, LMAX open sourced half of theirs (including their lightning fast lock-free ring buffer implementation). I detect the faint whiff of nefarious and manipulative activity here. But then again...unregulated markets...yadda yadda yadda.
 
ZBZB said:
Which exchange is better than Bitmex?
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That's the million dollar question. We all want security, performance, leverage and low fees.

Might experiment with Deribit. They have a legit rep. Book is thin but can work around that if needed.
 
_eug_ said:
Its a real beauty how this BTC moves, I have not traded it but boy its as technical as it gets.
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Exactly. How else could it function? No fundamentals, no commericals, pure speculation.

The language of the markets is laid bare in XBT, with very little distortion. It's the ultimate market for a beginner to study and pick up the correct knowledge to then go and successfully trade other markets.
 
bitmex ceo arthur hayes admitted they didn't have scaling in mind when they first drew up the blueprints for engineering their trading engine b/c they were focused on being the first to offer a 100x bitcoin futures product to customers with an automated margin-check+solid deleveraging mechanism.

bitmex needs a complete overhaul from the ground-up of their trading engine but they won't do that b/c it's insanely profitable for them to leave in-place a system that constantly overloads and freezes, leading to liquidations at earlier liquidation pricepoints than what the maths would suggest.

for example, let's say you initiate a position a 50x leverage. technically your liquidation price should be a -2%. but bitmex actually liquidates your entire account at around -1.5% and then pockets the remaining 0.5% into their "insurance fund."

as you can see here: https://www.bitmex.com/app/insuranceFund ,

the fund has grown to almost 30,000 BTC. lmao

anyways, until there's a good enough competitor, bitmex has no incentive to improve their trading engine. deribit is nice but even their trading engine only goes up to something like 5000tps.

apparently there's a bitmex competitor called Interdax that's going live this year. their trading engine is built by actual professionals who worked on traditional exchanges like nasdaq, ice, nyse. they say they'll be able to offer "hundreds of thousands of transactions per second" and a FIX and binary api so we'll see. i won't believe it until i see it though.

i think the CME should offer a emini-Bitcoin product. the maintenance margin should be very high (since bitcoin can easily go 10%+ in a single day) but if brokers can start offering day-trading margins at $500 or $1000 like they do with the emini ES/NQ/YM/RTY, it should become an absolute hit. cme execution is second to none and i would hope this would also pressure exchanges like bitmex to lower their fees. paying .075% for market orders is just plain ridiculous.
 
canoe said:
bitmex ceo arthur hayes admitted they didn't have scaling in mind when they first drew up the blueprints for engineering their trading engine b/c they were focused on being the first to offer a 100x bitcoin futures product to customers with an automated margin-check+solid deleveraging mechanism.
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Thought as much. The platform smells of a rush to market.

canoe said:
bitmex needs a complete overhaul from the ground-up of their trading engine but they won't do that b/c it's insanely profitable for them to leave in-place a system that constantly overloads and freezes, leading to liquidations at earlier liquidation pricepoints than what the maths would suggest.
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Exactly. Why fix something that ain't broke? From ShitMEX's perspective it's working just fine.

canoe said:
anyways, until there's a good enough competitor, bitmex has no incentive to improve their trading engine. deribit is nice but even their trading engine only goes up to something like 5000tps.
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Sorry, but that's still pretty piss poor. A reasonably simple lockless pipelined architecture should be at least an order of magnitude better.

canoe said:
apparently there's a bitmex competitor called Interdax that's going live this year. their trading engine is built by actual professionals who worked on traditional exchanges like nasdaq, ice, nyse. they say they'll be able to offer "hundreds of thousands of transactions per second" and a FIX and binary api so we'll see. i won't believe it until i see it though.
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Desperately needed.

canoe said:
i think the CME should offer a emini-Bitcoin product. the maintenance margin should be very high (since bitcoin can easily go 10%+ in a single day) but if brokers can start offering day-trading margins at $500 or $1000 like they do with the emini ES/NQ/YM/RTY, it should become an absolute hit. cme execution is second to none and i would hope this would also pressure exchanges like bitmex to lower their fees. paying .075% for market orders is just plain ridiculous.
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Agree. As someone who's spent many years using proper futures platforms such as Globex, the cryptosphere is a bit of a joke. Such a shame that the Merc made a mess out of their BTC product. The volumes are so low they may as well withdraw it and have another try.
 
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