Bitcoin (BTC) will likely hit lower levels of up to $6,000 but will avoid bigger losses, the CEO of derivatives giant BitMEX says. In the latest edition of the exchange’s Crypto Digest on March 12, Arthur Hayes joined other trading sources warning that Bitcoin was not safe from current market turmoil. Hayes tells of “intense volatility” Hayes stated that the content of the post should not be republished or reproduced outside of its original location. On Twitter, he described it as “a look into my trader brain during this time of intense market volatility.” In the short term, Hayes thinks …

A UK financial watchdog hastily retracted an official warning about Kraken after apparently confusing the exchange with online scammers — but a similar warning about BitMEX remains active. On March 3, the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a notice on its website cautioning citizens that the second-largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange by volume, Kraken, is not authorized to operate in the U.K. The warning stated the company is “targeting people in the UK”: “We believe this firm has been providing financial services or products in the UK without our authorization. Find out why to be especially wary of dealing …

Today the cryptocurrency market saw a huge drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC). According to the data analytics provider Skew on Feb. 26, over $150 million worth of Bitcoin was liquidated on the trading exchange BitMEX, the most seen since the new year began. Millions of dollars of long and short positions caused the value of the cryptocurrency to fall to $8,580, a decrease of more than 6%. $150mln+ liquidations on BitMEX today - highest in 2020 pic.twitter.com/WO7aKyNhcI — skew (@skewdotcom) February 26, 2020 Though the price of Bitcoin slightly rebounded to $8,813, this may be a difficult recovery …

BitMEX continues to field major criticism and even anger from traders who lost huge amounts of money in a flash crash involving altcoin XRP. The crash, which occurred at 14.00 UTC on Feb. 13, saw XRP/USD fall 60% from $0.33 to just $0.13 — for two seconds. XRP crashes on BitMEX In that time, traders complain, measures designed to prevent liquidations of positions failed to activate, and BitMEX automatically erased their entire balances. BitMEX is well known for offering trades with significant leverage. In the case of XRP, traders are able to leverage by up to 50 times. Following the …

Controversial altcoin XRP has finally launched on crypto derivatives giant BitMEX — but so far, its price has failed to react. In a tweet on Feb. 3, BitMEX confirmed it had decided to support XRP, the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, for perpetual swaps against the United States dollar. XRP squeezes out 7% gains Despite regular efforts from supporters to make major exchanges such as BitMEX pay attention to XRP, data from Coin360 and Cointelegraph Markets suggests the actual interest in the token is minimal. XRP/USD briefly grew by 11% at the time of the announcement, only to abandon upward …

Bitcoin (BTC) futures are fast becoming the darling of institutional investors as open interest spikes 60% since the start of 2020. Data from monitoring resource Skew Markets shows that open interest across major futures offerings from exchanges now stands at more than $4 billion. BitMEX, OKEx futures open interest passes $1B Over half of that stems from two companies — derivatives giant BitMEX and crypto exchange OKEx — both of which now have open interest in excess of $1 billion. Bitcoin futures open interest (exchanges only). Source: Skew Markets On Monday, fellow platform Deribit confirmed month-on-month Bitcoin futures options turnover …

A growing precision in the amount of decimals for Bitcoin (BTC) points to decreasing usage as a unit of account. This is one of the conclusions of a Jan. 27 report by BitMEX Research, which analyzed transaction outputs for the past decade. The report evaluated a total of 1.3 billion outputs, amounting to 5.4 billion BTC worth $12 trillion. Each transaction was categorized by its degree of decimal precision — what is the last non-zero value in a payment. Over 70% of Bitcoin outputs currently use the highest degree of precision possible of one satoshi (0.00000001 BTC), while in 2012 …

For the first time since 2013, the U.S. is no longer the top recipient of Bitcoin (BTC) as valued in USD, as Singapore took the lead over the course of 2019. As of Dec. 5, 2019, global users sent BTC valued at $8.58 billion to Singapore in 2019, according to analytics site Crystal Blockchain. Users in Singapore received more dollars via Bitcoin last year than anywhere else in the globe. The U.S. held the top spot from 2014 to 2018 but slipped to 2nd place, receiving $7.46 billion in BTC, per Crystal Blockchain’s data. Seychelles leads the outflow Singapore, however, …

The BitMEX Insurance Fund has added nearly 13,000 BTC in 2019, reaching a total of just over 33,491 BTC as of Dec. 30. This is equivalent to 0.19% of the total Bitcoin in circulation, based on the data available at Blockchain.com. The fund, which the cryptocurrency exchange set up to ensure that liquidation orders related to leveraged positions are filled, ended 2018 with almost 20,800 BTC. This means that the fund has seen a 61% increase since the start of 2019. How does the BitMEX Insurance Fund work? Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX set up the fund to give margin traders …

BitMEX, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume to date, now holds 0.18% of all Bitcoins (BTC) in circulation. In a Dec. 26 tweet, James Lopp, CTO at New York-based crypto custody startup Casa, also pointed out that BitMEX’s dedicated insurance fund has surged 62% in 2019. BitMEX holds 33,449 Bitcoins out the 18.1 million mined to date According to daily historical records of BitMEX Insurance Fund, the balance of the fund has grown from 20,776 BTC on Jan. 1, 2019 to 33,449 BTC on Dec. 26, worth around $239 million at press time. As such, the world’s …

Initial exchange offerings (IEOs), which launched in 2019 have lost investors up to 98% of their money, damning new statistics show. In its latest report on the phenomenon published on Dec. 23, the analytics arm of exchange BitMEX, BitMEX Research, identified twelve major IEOs that launched this year. Of those, eleven are now almost worthless compared to the price at which they first traded on exchanges. Almost all IEOs down 80% or more “Relative to the first traded exchange price... the performance to date has been poor. Almost all the tokens are down over 80%,” the report summarized. IEO investment …

Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX added support for native segregated witness (SegWit) addresses for Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals, which lets users pay lower transaction fees. According to an announcement on Dec. 12, BitMEX now allows its users to withdraw Bitcoin to Bech32 addresses, the one that natively supports the segregated witness standard. Bitcoin address formats As the announcement explains, the Bitcoin network currently supports three address formats. The first one — Bitcoin’s original address format — is pay to public key hash (P2PKH), which starts with a 1. The second format is the pay to script hash (P2SH), which allows users to send …