Bitmax.io Review – Scam or Not?
BitMax.io is a Chinese cryptocurrency trading platform offers you trading various altcoins at a reasonable fee. They are listing more than 60 different altcoin trading pairs and lets you trade on leverage and gain a significant amount of money not just with the most popular coins, but also with some unique coins. They have their own native token, BTMX that you can use for trading.
Review Contents
- About the Company
- Services offered on BitMax
- Getting started on Bitmax
- Available Order Types
- Trading Fees
- User experience and support on Bitmax
- Exchange Security
- Supported Countries
- Conclusion
About Bitmax
BitMax is a new global operator of digital asset exchanges, available for various groups of clients from retail to institutions. The BitMax team hopes that through building upon a series of open and fair market rules, they would be able to boost the liquidity of the overall market, provide support to the blockchain structural optimization and at the end promote equitable resource allocation. Leveraging on blockchain technology, BitMax aims to establish an autonomous platform, and build out a new type of economic autonomy program.
BitMax started its operation at the end of 2018. The founding partner and CEO of the company is George Cao who has previously been employed by an investment fund and has obtained its Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, specialized in Computer Science after graduating at the China University of Technology.
Bitmax is pretty active on various social media platforms. There are over 4000 subscribers on their Youtube channel where they are some videos about how to use the platform and what is the BTMX token about. They have over 17k follower on Twitter where you can get notified about updates and listing information of new tokens on the trading platform.
They are actively blogging on Medium, you can read on their blog weekly analysis of price fluctuations and altcoin listing along with some updates done to the platform itself. Follow their platform updates on Reddit and Chainnode forums too.
Services offered on BitMax
You can trade 30 different tokens on BitMax.io including the following coins:
ZEC, HT, BAT, OKB, USDC, KCS, ALGO, DASH, XRP, ETH, PAX, ADA, LTC, ZRX, USDT, BTC, XLM, BCHSV, BTT, BTMX, ETC, TRX, ELF, IOST, EOS, NEO, ZIL, ONT, BNB, BCH
They offer the option to trade 3-5-10x leverage on each of these coins. The maximum borrowable amount is depending on each altcoin, check their list for further information.
BitMax has its own native token, BTMX. BTMX is a major component of the ecosystem on BitMax and is designed to be used solely as the primary token on the platform. It is ERC-20 standard and issued on Ethereum blockchain. BTMX is a non-refundable functional utility token which is used as the unit of exchange between participants trading on BitMax.
Getting started on Bitmax
In order to start using BitMax, you need to sign up using an email and a password. After completing the form, you will receive an email with the verification code that lets you log in into your account. // It is possible you will receive the email in Chinese, so it can arrive into your spam box.
If you manage to login you can deposit coins to your account to start trading. Head to Funds at the top right corner and click on Deposit. This will bring you to a page where you will see your unique deposit address. You can select any coins from those which can be traded at BitMax, just make sure you are sending the right coins to the right address as they do not have any control over these addresses so there is no option to reallocate funds if they ended up in the wrong wallet.
If you want to withdraw money from your account you can do that in all of the various coins offered for trading on BitMax. The withdrawal limits and fees vary by each altcoin, but you usually only need to pay a small amount of fee for the network. Bear in mind for security reasons there are some restriction on withdrawals: new users cannot withdraw until 24 hours post registration and users cannot withdraw until 24 hours post change of password and Google 2FA. These measures are in place to protect your account from unauthorized access.
You can trade on BitMax without verifying your account, but they are limiting withdrawals for unverified users. If you verify yourself, it will also lift the trading limit you are allowed to trade on the platform. There are three levels of verification available at BitMax.
At Level 1 you can trade up to 2 BTC daily, with Level 2 your limit is lifted to 100 BTC and with Level 3 you can even go higher on a case by cases approval. Verification requests are reviewed within 2 business days, so bear in mind that before you need urgent withdrawal from the platform but have not verified your account yet.
In order to verify yourself, you need to provide a government issued photo ID and a proof of address. For Level 2 verification you also need to provide a selfie of yourself holding the ID.
Trading on Bitmax (Order Types)
After you have funded your account, you can start trading right away with your money against the 30 different altcoins available at BitMax. Bear in mind you need to verify yourself if you want to withdraw money from the platform.
On the trading dashboard, you have two option: trade with cash or trade on margin, each has its own trading dashboard.
On the left, you can see all the available tradable coins, their last prices and the changes in the past 24 hours. To help you with the decision, you can also see the maximum amount of leverage you can take on a specific altcoin.
If you click on one of these coins, a live interactive chart comes up on the center with all the features provided by Tradingview. You can select the time frame, the chart type and also add all the indicators you would use for making your trading decision.
On the right side, you can see the live order book and the recent trades on the platform. The prices are expressed in USDT stablecoin, note that BitMax does not accept fiat currencies.
There are four different order-types you can place on BitMax: limit, market, stop-limit and stop-market orders are the available options you can choose from the manage your risk and increase your profitability. Next to each order type, you can see the Maximum Buying Power. The Maximum Buying Power is an estimated value based upon the Reference Price. The actual Maximum Buying Power is calculated with the actual order price.
BitMax introduced a Transaction Mining model to encourage users to trade on the platform as part of the overall liquidity strategy. The limit of 10 billion BTMX utility tokens is strictly imposed without any further increase. 49% (4.9 billion) of total issuance, pre-distribution part, will be unlocked along with the transaction mining; while 51% (5.1 billion) will be gradually released and distributed to incentivize users for daily participation in transaction mining.
BitMax distributes back 80% of the net platform transaction fee to those token holders who have signed up and agreed to share their token transaction information.
There are four different ways you can interact on the trading platform.
- Taker – When the user places an order that is immediately filled fully or partially (for example a market or stop order) before getting on the order book, the user for that order is defined a “taker,” taking liquidity away. The trade (full or partial) is Taker trade.
- Maker – When the user places an order that doesn’t fill immediately partially or fully (like a limit order) and sits on the order book waiting to be matched, the user for that order is defined as a “maker,” providing liquidity to the market. The trade (full or partial) is Maker trade.
- Regular Trading – User can opt for NOT participating in either Mining or Reverse-Mining and pay a transaction fee at a certain level.
- Mining – User can participate in “mining” on BitMax.io by using the platform for trading, the process of paying a transaction fee at a certain level and receiving a certain amount of BTMX as a reward for trading on the platform.
Fees on Bitmax
BitMax although runs a maker-taker fee model, the trading fees are the same on the marker and on the taker side. The trading fee is set to a flat 0.04% which is already a very good fee on the market. In addition to this, they charge a 0.003% mining fee and you can get 0.0012% on reverse mining as a liquidity maker.
BitMax has an innovative trading model which lets you decrease your trading fees. When you select “Mining” mode, your transaction fee is 0.1% for all Taker/Maker trades and you will receive a certain amount of BTMX as a reward for trading on the platform. Mined BTMX is settled on an hourly basis for the prior day. In the “Reverse-Mining” mode, you don’t need to pay a transaction fee. You will get 0.04% rebates by executing Maker trades and the equivalent market value of BTMX token being deducted from your account.
The interest rate for leverage deals are depending on the trading pair you are dealing with and usually, it is between 0.02%-0.12%. Note the BTMX native token has a higher interest rate, like 0.8%.
You have an option to reduce these interest fees as well if you join their membership program. There are certain cards you can purchase for a fixed price which reduces the price you have to pay.
Deposits are free of charge on BitMax.
User experience and support on Bitmax
Bitmax.io is designed in a way to ensure its user can access the trading platform from anywhere. Beyond the web-based interface, you can also download the iOS and Android applications to have access to your account even on the go. The site is available in Chines and Korean beside English. It could happen the site loads in Chinese first, which can be intimidating for the Western users, but you can easily switch the language at the top and the content is available throughout the site in English.
Similar to this your registration confirmation email can arrive in Chinese too. As this is a relatively new platform, hopefully, these small issues will be resolved soon by the development team. You can reach Bitmax support through submitting your request in a ticket or join the Telegram channel where they are online 24/7. Alternatively, you can send the support team a simple email too.
Security on Bitmax
To secure your account, BitMax suggests you to setup a 2FA. You can use a Google Authenticator or any other third party authentication software which provides 2FA services. They even have some additional security measures in place to protect your account, such as withdrawal confirmation by email and holding period of withdrawal after the password or 2FA changes.
Supported Countries
All countries except:
- USA
- The Balkans
- Belarus
- Burma
- Ivory Coast
- Cuba
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Iran
- Iraq
- Liberia
- North Korea
- Sudan
- Syria
- Zimbabwe
- Algeria
- Bangladesh
- Bolivia
- Cambodia
- Ecuador
- Nepal
Conclusion
BitMax is a newly launched margin trading place where you can trade beyond the popular coins, like Bitcoin and Ethereum with several other coins with leverage up to 10x. The trading fees are very good compared to other trading platform and you also have the option to reduce these fees to even lower with the help of BitMax’s own native token, BTMX.
Although BitMax does not deal with fiat money, in order to withdraw funds from the platform you need to verify yourself with ID documents even if you just withdraw crypto. BitMax can be a great choice for those who would like to use margin trading on altcoins with cheap fees. Once the team fixes some language issues, like pages loading in Chinese that BitMax will be a good option to trade on margin. And after all, you can always use Google Translate if something is not translated yet.
Pros
- margin trading available in less-known altcoins too
- option to reduce trading fees
- native token
Cons
- not available for US users
- site is not completely localized for English
- KYC is needed for withdrawal