Just about the time today I was writing a LinkedIn post touting the greatness of Huobi Global, BitMEX and founders were drowning in a sea of despair, loneliness, and certain doom in light of CFTC and criminal charges.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jarettdunn_bitcoin-ethereum-altcoin-activity-6717459343492616192-sPnW
CFTC Charges BitMEX Owners with Illegally Operating a Cryptocurrency Derivatives Trading Platform and Anti-Money Laundering Violations
I hopped on YouTube:
Became YouTube God for a short time:
I immediately cashed out my winnings on FTX, and made a bet on long EXCH-PERP - at 20x - near the bottom of BTC's 2-3% decline from BitMEX news. This perpetual indexes BNB, HT, OKB, LEO, and GT tokens - the best of the best that ain't scam!
I proceeded to make some predictions:
Either way you crack this barrel, Hayes and his cronies had built a massive exchange allowing folks around the world to 100:1 leverage cryptocurrencies with minimal, or no, KYC involved.
Know-your-customer is extremely important when it comes to securities, cryptos, and especially anything at leverage - as regulators in different countries think that riskier bets should be served with gambling terms (when you see stuff like 'this is incredibly risky, risk only what you can afford to lose - those are gambling TOS, and stay far away!).
This is literally my cover photo on my personal Facebook:
Will the domain be seized? Will they exit scam? Time will tell. Really, though, their insurance fund today was 36k BTC or about $384 million USD - this isn't even a good fraction of the funds on the exchange.
While the immediate reprecussions, in any case, for the Bitcoin market are indeed doom and gloom - the fact that MEX has been perpetuating some of the worst habits of crypto exchanges (including an API that often returns 'lulz sorry we're too busy to serve ya' which kept me far away from making algo-trading solutions on their platform) like serving any US customer who wanted to VPN into their site - and liquidating millions and millions of funds by controlling BTC price, or allowing the perpetual funding rates to increase as the discrepency between spot and MEX diverged and diverged - all of these things were bad for Bitcoin. What's bad for MEX, ergo, is good for Bitcoin.
Including many other exchanges - including my new-found love for Huobi, my continuing love as Market Maker and Broker on Binance, and other derivatives exchanges who are much, much more careful not to service Yanks.
In the short term, we can expect a number of consequences. People and whales and institutions will pick up huge amounts of discounted Bitcoin, and a newfound surge will see prices skyrocket above the yearly resistance we were just testing (and it's odd the feds would time these actions just now - either to bolster their fiscal year-end reviews, or just blatantly attack the Blockchain community?). Next, we'll see the funds withdrawn from MEX (maybe? Possibly? Hopefully?) hit other top exchanges, notably the ones I'd mentioned.
Long live Binance, FTX, Deribit, and Huobi - doing the right thing.
Long live King of Coins.
Long live Blockchain.
To hell with BitMEX.