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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

BitMEX is the best, most reputable, and most secure crypto derivatives exchange. Their fees are -0.025% (maker) and 0.075% (taker), practically the lowest on the market.

They have never been hacked. They actively work to track and stop hacked proceeds from being deposited on their platform; and they do a better job at it than most regulated exchanges. (The complaint alleges one instance of a miss; but just look at the FinCEN leaks to understand how it's impossible to get everything).

3 of the founders live in jurisdictions w/o extradition treaties to the USA, so I hope they will be able to continue operating the best bitcoin exchange.

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> Their fees are -0.025% (maker) and 0.075% (taker), practically the lowest on the market.

This used to be lowest, it's pretty high nowadays for traders who do volume (huobi, binance, okex, ftx all have the same product for lower fees). A few other exchanges like Bybit and Deribit have the same fees.

I'll add that they have a fantastic API, by crypto exchange standards. Worst, by far, is OKEx.

except for the overload? Not the fastest API either.

What alternative would you claim is better with equivalent liquidity?

I pay a thousand a year in trading fees to my stockbroker in Australia and they don't even offer an API.

Last tax year my trading fees were low double digits with bitmex.

The volume with both is about the same.

> better with equivalent liquidity?

this really depends on what kind of size you trade and how you execute. Binance futures (their btc/usdt perp) is most likely cheaper if you look at take fee + spread + slippage. Their default taker fee is 4bps (or 3.6 bps if you pay it in BNB). That means you can slip $4 (with BTC at 10k) and pay the same for your exec - but with most sizes you don't slip that much, if you trade small binance is most often better (spread + slippage wise) since the tick size (minimum spread) is 0.01bps instead of 0.5bps. And on top of that you get a massive fee discount.

> I pay a thousand a year in trading fees to my stockbroker in Australia and they don't even offer an API.

I wouldn't compare Bitmex to an Australian stock broker, I would compare it to other crypto exchanges

Maybe playing with derivatives was considered to be something similar to gambling and that's why it attracted regulators attention. There is a lot of "currencies" like loyalty points, games currencies, etc. which do not require KYC checks (for now, at least)?

And yet none of that goodness counts because they decided not to do KYC.

Well, good for the people and customers, too.

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