ByBit

In this review, we shall look at ByBit, a global crypto derivatives trading platform priding itself on its quality leverage trading options paired advanced features, great interface, and performance.

Screenshots

ByBit Review: Key Features

Source: ByBit.com

Started in 2018, the ByBit platform posits itself as the key market player in the crypto derivatives space, friendly to veteran and newcomer traders alike. Led by its CEO Ben Zhou, the platform is based in Singapore, but its outreach is already a global one, thanks to an impressive array of features, including:

• Margin trading with up to 100x leverage. Trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and XRP perpetual contracts with up to 50x, 100x or lower leverage to find a suitable balance between risk and profits.
• Multi-currency support. At ByBit, you have the ability to deposit, withdraw, and open positions in BTC, ETH, EOS, XRP, and even USDT (not available for trading, hedging only). Use the internal Asset Exchange feature to convert cryptocurrencies with ease.
• Low fees. ByBit offers some of the most competitive margin trading fees on the market.
• No KYC exchange. The platform does not ask you for any personal or private information.
• Powerful and well-designed trading interface. ByBit has a robust, powerful and well-designed platform and is easy to navigate yet is full of advanced options. It can handle up to 100,000 trades per second.
• Secure platform. The exchange has no history of hacks, breaches, or leaked user information.
• 24/7 customer support. The support is available in multiple languages and takes the form of desk-based live chat function and email.

All in all, ByBit is a relatively fresh yet ambitious margin trading exchange and a viable alternative to competing leverage trading sites like BitMEX or PrimeXBT.

Bybit is a relatively new exchange that started in the 2018 bear market. Although its headquarters is in Singapore, the exchange is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands as Bybit Fintech Limited. Besides Singapore, ByBit has offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

ByBit’s founding team has a strong background in the Forex industry, investment banking, and blockchain technology. The exchange’s CEO is Ben Zhou.

During its first two years of operation, ByBit has accrued over 100,000 users from North America, Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and other prominent crypto markets.

Source: ByBit.com

Due to regulatory issues, ByBit does not allow traders from the United States on its platform. However, U.S. traders are not alone, since ByBit also excludes residents and citizens from:

• Quebec (Canada)
• Singapore
• Cuba
• Crimea and Sevastopol
• Iran
• Syria
• North Korea
• Sudan

Other than these countries, ByBit’s services are available worldwide.

Visit ByBit

ByBit fees

ByBit is a generous exchange in terms of trading fees. The exchange charges 0.075% for the market takers and pays 0.025% for the market makers, which is a relatively fair price in the industry.

Other than trading fees, BitBuy users also incur a funding fee, which indicates funding exchanged between buyers and sellers. A positive funding rate means that you paid to fund someone, while a negative funding rate indicates that you are receiving it. However, ByBit does not pay nor receive any of the funding fees.

ByBit does not charge any deposit and withdrawal fees. The platform only asks you to cover the network fees during withdrawals, which are fixed and amount to:

As you can see, the services provided by ByBit are not expensive. Here is how they fare with other popular margin trading exchanges:

In terms of fees, ByBit competes with other low fees and high leverage tier platforms, namely BitMEX, PrimeXBT, and PrimeBit. However, ByBit stands out from the group by being the only multi-currency margin trading exchange in this cluster, while others are so-called Bitcoin-only platforms.

Last but not least, ByBit has an integrated Asset Exchange, which lets you switch between different cryptocurrencies within the platform. Each swap comes with a different rate, but if the difference between the quotation rate can never be more than 0.5% per swap.

In sum, ByBit is a very competitive exchange in terms of fees and unique features.

How Does ByBit Support Leverage Trading?

ByBit supports leverage trading based on the value of the derivative you want to use for trading.

Leverage trading is a bit riskier option, best left to more experienced traders who are capable of capitalizing on the platform’s offer to trade BTC/USD with 100x leverage. The combinations involving ETH, EOS, and XRP offers leverage going to 50x at maximum, which is still an attractive option for risk-lovers. The platform offers higher leverage compared to regular trading platforms like Kraken or Binance but is less compared with PrimeBit.

Margin trading warning. Source: ByBit.com

ByBit also features risk limit schemes in four supported cryptocurrencies, allowing for the reduction in limits. Expenditures related to financing are covered by the interest rates and calculated premiums and discounts.

ByBit uses the market maker/taker approach to its pricing, meaning that the level of fees you pay in terms of derivatives depends on your capacity to support the platform’s liquidity. In this case, a market maker will have the right to a rebate (at the rate of 0.025% for each trade). Otherwise, regular traders will be required to pay 0.075% per trade.

ByBit’s Insurance and Liquidation Scheme

As the settlement of futures contracts carries various risks, the ByBit team has come up with the insurance fund mechanism. Its resources become available if a trader undergoes liquidation which goes below what is considered the bankruptcy price i.e. their initial margin gets wiped out. The platform also features several mechanisms to tackle this advanced trading segment:

• Stop-loss mechanism on positions prevents them from reaching the rates which entail liquidation.
• Auto margin replenishment is used to keep the margins at satisfactory levels whenever they are in danger of becoming depleted.
• Dual price mechanism is put in place to lower the risks of market manipulations by introducing the mark price (global Bitcoin price) which is tied to liquidation and the last traded price which serves as the basis of calculation when a position is closed (market price on ByBit)

ByBit also implements a system supporting automatic deleveraging. It gets activated in case a position is unavailable for liquidation while having the price that goes above the bankruptcy one and the insurance fund is unable to cover for it. In this case, this system can automatically deleverage the position of a trader based on predefined settings.

Is ByBit a Secure Trading Option?

ByBit will not have you go through know-your-customer (KYC) procedures, meaning that you will not be asked to submit ID documents or any similar information for trading. Yet, this hardly means that the platform has the security put on the back burner. In addition to the two-factor authentication (2FA) via email, SMS, and Google Authenticator, the platform will offer to store the customer’s tokens in an array of offline (cold) wallets located on a secure site.

Moving stored funds is regulated with the use of multi-signature addresses. This entails having the platform use multiple keys to sign transactions between wallets. Thus, no person will be given too much power in handling assets stored on the exchange. A portion of the funds that are needed for immediate withdrawals is kept in an equivalent of hot wallets.

The platform also uses SSL encryption to power its communication engine, with addresses and passwords needed for transactions being fully encrypted. All withdrawal requests undergo multiple security checkups prior to being approved.

As of February 2021, the ByBit platform is yet to experience a security breach, which means that the platform remains trustworthy and secure.

How Does ByBit Work?

Understanding at least the fundamentals of this type of crypto trading is a must, as ByBit does expect its users to be familiar with the terms such as “derivatives”, “leverage”, and “perpetual contracts”. What it does is to provide traders with an accessible environment in which the derivatives are tied to cryptocurrencies and made available for trading based on the available leverage.

Perpetual futures contracts are used in a manner similar to what one does with standardized futures contracts, meaning that they represent agreements to trade with an asset or currency (or any other instrument) at a predefined price at a particular time in the future. This allows the users to try to profit from speculating on the prices one of these assets may actually have in the future. Yet, unlike what is found with traditional futures contracts, their perpetual contracts will never expire.

ByBit specialized in linking the cryptocurrency world with that of their fiat counterparts, with the platform offering support for four markets at the moment. The supported cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and XRP, with USD serving as the second component of all of their pairings.

To provide more convenient trading for its customers, ByBit also offers an internal asset exchange - an option to exchange coins directly on the platform, with any of the five currencies currently being supported for this type of operation - BTC, ETH, EOS, XRP, and USDT. This adds a unique extra layer of functionality to the platform and makes it useful for traders who want to hedge their assets and profits against price fluctuations.

Source: ByBit.com

The exchange price is based on the Real-Time exchange rate as you enter the currencies you want to trade. Every asset swap has its on Quotation rate, and if the Quotation Rate differs from the Real-Time Exchange Rate more than 0.5%, the trade is not executed. Hence, the exchange cost is always no more than 0.5% per swap.

Yet, as of February 2021, Bybit does not provide exchange service between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies.

Explore ByBit

What Is the Performance Like?

ByBit clearly wants to keep the door open for various trader profiles, from small-time retailers to the organized big-time investors. To achieve this, it had to build a solid performance infrastructure, with the promise of supporting theoretical 100,000 transactions per second. Paired with the fact that every single trade is executed at 10-microsecond intervals, one can easily see that ByBit can deliver the goods in the segment of its technological robustness.

Yet, the team behind it promises not to stop at this level, as its tech and engineering experts constantly work forex and blockchain professionals to keep the performance levels in the line with the growth of the platform’s customer base, which is reportedly already reaching more than 100,000 users globally.

Clean Trading Interface

ByBit can rightfully pride itself on the clean and accessible design of its main trading screen. The layout design is helped by its color palette, with its fuscous background serving to complement the uncluttered trading screen. Various components of this interface are organized in a minimalist manner, with no single feature being left in the background or playing second fiddle to the others.

Special mention goes to the use of pink and green-shaded candles against the dark background, while the order book and the recent trade history windows perfectly fit with the general layout. Trading features can be managed from the dedicated section to the right of the screen, including access to the contract details, market activity, and help resources.

Source: ByBit.com

Windows featuring asset overview and positions are readily available for moving and they can switch positions within the screen depending on your preferences. ByBit allows for the simple manipulation of the scale design parameters themselves, including the positioning of its axis, indicator data, and percentages. The basic color scheme can also be changed, alongside all of the metrics given on the screen, including the trader’s time zone.

Finally, dedication to clear presentation extends to ByBit giving you a comprehensive overview of a particular trade before its execution. As the operations involved in trading with derivatives are often complex, this is clearly a plus in any user’s book, be he/she a pro or a beginner.

Customer Support and Referral

ByBit does not stumble on its customer support features either, as its help resources available throughout the day, 7 days a week. The support is available in multiple languages and takes the form of desk-based live chat function and email, while the phone support is currently not available.

The platform has a well-established presence on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and Reddit. Finally, the ByBit’s referral program allows customers to receive an equivalent of 10 USD in BTC for each new trader they bring to the platform.

Source: ByBit.com

The Ease of Making Deposits with Bybit

As of February 2021, ByBit accepts BTC, ETH, EOS, XRP, and USDT as deposits to trade. The process starts by creating a ByBit account. The procedure is rather straightforward and revolves around the registration of your email address or mobile number. The email registration will have you enter your email and create a password, followed by the use of a verification code. A similar procedure is used with mobile registration, with appropriate codes distributed via SMS.

Source: ByBit.com

Once the account is created, the users would do well to check the account security settings and create a strong password linked to personal email or mobile number, while checking the option to use two-factor authentication. Authentication will be done by the user’s phone prior to gaining access to the account or making transactions, while the withdrawals will be made possible once the Google authentication option is activated.

Depositing is done in a rather intuitive manner i.e. by clicking on the Assets tab, selecting the supported cryptocurrency and interacting with the Deposit option. In order to complete this process, the system will provide you with an exchange wallet address. Supported cryptocurrencies will be used to top up one’s account as ByBit does not allow the use of fiat ones for this purpose.

Source: ByBit.com

In addition to featuring no minimum required deposit amounts, no fees will be charged by the platform, apart from the minuscule fee for processing the operation on the blockchain. Yet, the user should bear in mind that ByBit does not apply the same policy to withdrawals, as the currencies supported by the platform do have minimum withdrawal amounts as follows:

• Bitcoin: 0.0005 BTC
• Ethereum: 0.01 ETH
• EOS: 0.1 EOS
• Ripple: 0.25 XRP
• Tether: 5 USDT

Go to ByBit

Conclusion

In short, ByBit has managed to establish itself as a respectable platform for crypto-based derivatives trading. Its strong points include a robust trading platform, excellent leverage trading support and associated advanced mechanism to make it run smoother, great interface and quality security options.