We need to talk about Bittrex, one of the worse cryptocurrency exchanges around. Unfortunately, Bittrex is one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges out there (it's the third largest exchange).
With the growing attention that cryptocurrency attracted in 2017 during Bitcoin's meteoric rise, Bittrex and many other exchanges saw unprecedented user growth.
Even though Bittrex in my opinion was already on the precipice of failure before Bitcoin saw its explosive growth, in October 2017 Bittrex started shutting down accounts with seemingly no response and then finally after loud public outcry they finally addressed the concerns but didn't address everything.
The real issues with Bittrex are that a) it's slow b) socket status = slow and c) socket status = disconnected d) the UI sucks - and did I mention the UI sucks?
Why is Bittrex struggling?
Towards the end of 2017, Bittrex apparently did some "upgrades" to their platform, which seemingly failed to do anything. The slow Websocket connection issue was still happening frequently, if you didn't encounter constantly disconnected sockets.
I get it: building a platform like Bittrex that is handling tens of thousands of trades per second, possibly even hundreds of thousands would be a technically complicated problem to solve. But, we really need to start questioning why an exchange who was probably making a few hundred thousand dollars per day in fees is NOT reinvesting it back into making their platform usable.
From the page detailing Bittrex' fees lists the following:
All trades are charged .25% of the profits of the trade. This is calculated by taking the (amount * purchase price * .0025). Any portion of an order that has not execute, will be refunded fully upon the cancellation of the order.
At this rate, it's a fair assumption to make that Bittrex is not broke nor struggling. But, the Bittrex team itself seems to be quite small and based on their well-known slow response times, the support team is small as well.
The beautiful thing about the modern advent of hosting and imaging tools is that a proper team of system administrators should have a process of scaling your web architecture down to a tee.
Scaling is a problem that has been solved and simplified, we aren't in the nineties anymore we have options like Docker which companies like eBay, Netflix and more are using to scale their platforms.
I am not ignorant, I am a developer and I understand how databases/servers work. I acknowledge that Bitrex is a read and write heavy exchange platform. But look at platforms like StackOverflow, which run on very few servers and a simple stack doing LARGE numbers.
We are not talking about a bedroom operation here, Bittrex is one of the biggest exchanges around. Make no mistake, they can afford to hire professionals and consultants (if need be) to fix their platform.
Google results for Bittrex are unfavourable spanning back as far as 2014 and in cryptocurrency trust is essential. They seem to be barely treading above water with their exchange and competition is heating up, Bittrex are not the only fish in the sea and sharks are circling them.
Manipulation city...
Trading bots on any online exchange type platform is a given, but Bittrex seems to be infested with bots. There are more bots on Bittrex manipulating the order books than there are rats in a New York City sewer.
You notice the bots a lot more on smaller cap coins with lower amounts of trading volume. Coins seemingly with little interest actively being traded back and forth, the giveaway that bots are playing is the orders are irregular looking sizes, seriously who buys 0.00001 of something in a buy order?
I highly suspect that Bittrex themselves are manipulating their own exchange by giving the impression all markets are being actively traded, when in reality bots (and or bot) are only trading.
What makes this even more laughable is a Google search will yield people questioning weird trading patterns on Bittrex as far back as 2014.
Stuck funds for days
It seems verification and support issues are not a rare occurence for exchanges unfortunately, but Bittrex being one of the big #3 seem to be having more issues due to their size.
This Business Insider story seems to highlight the number of issues and sheer scale of the setbacks they are facing as an exchange.
I left Bittrex
Frustrated with the missed trading opportunities on Bittrex, their horrible support and seemingly blasé attitude towards customers who have had their funds frozen and desperate for an answer.
I moved to Binance about four months ago and honestly, I have never looked back. The UI isn't exactly the most amazing, but it works well and I've never missed a trading opportunity because their platform is slow.
It's clear to me that Binance believe in reinvesting back into their business, the money that Binance is making is being used to strengthen the platform and ensure it has one of the best uptime rates in the cryptocurrency exchange business.