Bitfinex - First Impressions

In this post I will give a short review of Bitfinex (it's a cryptocurrency exchange) based on my first day of using it. For most of my previous trading endeavours I have been using Kraken, which often requires some patience, but gets the job done. I have also used Cryptopia to trade certain altcoins which which were nowhere else to be found.

Disclaimer: In the following paragraphs, I refer to both IOTA and MIOTA. IOTA is the currency, but the price of IOTA is usually given as the price per Mega IOTA, or MIOTA (1 million IOTA).

Why I had to try Bitfinex

Recently I've read a lot about IOTA and was seriously considering investing in it, but I somehow managed to forget about it until seeing that it rose by 90% last night. Having previously made the mistake on falsely believing that I'm to late into currencies before, I decided that I still wanted to invest in it. I really believe in some of IOTA's fundamentals, so even though the recent growth might be somewhat of a bubble, I'm confident that IOTA has a bright future. They're also backed by some big companies, which is a good testament to their technology. Bitfinex was the first exchange I found where I could buy IOTA, so I that's why I decided to give it a try.

Setting up an account was easy

Setting up an account was done in a few minutes. If you're only trading with cryptocurrencies and not Euros or Dollars, nothing more than an email adress is required for identification.

Security

After having set up my account and confirmed it through my email, I was prompted with certain security measures such as two factor authentication. I was able to configure this in a few minutes and the user experience was great. Later, that same day I was going to deposit some ether to invest in IOTA. Like Kraken, Bitfinex uses Cloudflare to protect against DDoS attacks. While the intentions are good, this often means that you have to reload the site a few times before the website appears. I my case, I had to reload the page so many times that I got temporarily banned.

I tried again a few minutes later and the page loaded without problems, but when I tried to log in, the fields where I would write my username and password never loaded, leaving me with the following screen forever.

I waited a few seconds and tried again. This time everything worked well.

Using Bitfinex

It was quite easy to deposit ether. Placing a limit order was also somewhat intuitive. Everything was easy to access, but the page layout is quite different from Kraken and Cryptopia, but I imagine this takes some time to get used to on most exchanges. Having deposited 0.25ETH, I wanted to spend all of it on IOTA.

This proved to be a challenge, as I was prompted to give my order as the amount of MIOTA I was buying and the price I was willing to pay per MIOTA. Of course, this is simple math, but I really wish there was a feature where I could rather specify how much I wanted to spend and how much I wanted to pay per MIOTA. Kraken has this feature and it is really convenient, as it prevents you from being stuck with something like 0.00001 ether in your wallet after a trade. My solution was to buy exactly 25 MIOTA for exactly 0.01 ether per MIOTA. Once I had submitted my trade, it was immediately added to the order book. This was a massive improvement over Kraken, where I sometimes have to submit my orders ten times before they are accepted. The trading volume seemed pretty high as well as my order was processed quickly.

Summary

Bitfinex claims to be the biggest and most advanced Bitcoin trading platform in the world, so I guess some scalability issues are to be expected. The platform itself seems great as long as you are pacient enough to get through the login process. In addition to trading, Bitfinex also offers a margin wallet, letting you lend currency to traders in exchange for a fee, which I'm excited to give a try sometime in the future.

I couldn't find any info on Bitfinex affiliate program, but I've sent them a message, so hopefully I'll hear back from them. Let me know how your experiences with Bitfinex has been. Which exchange is your favorite?