Bittrex cryptocurrency policy has long been a mystery to outsiders, who have struggled to understand the problem. This mystery deepened this week after the exchange announced that it was removing Mysterium, a cryptocurrency that it only added last year and still had a respectable trading volume. At the news of the withdrawal, Mysterium and Apex, the other token whose withdrawal is expected, fell sharply.
Present today and disappear tomorrow
There was a time when Bittrex was the site where all the new crypto-currencies aspired to be listed, the event guaranteeing an instantaneous price increase. Then, last year, the wave of new additions slowed down before virtually stopping completely, and the developers went elsewhere. It is not a coincidence that Exchanges such as Binance, Gate.io and Kucoin have flourished since Bittrex became calm. Traders, who once encouraged their followers to sign up on the US Exchange, are now urging their audience to go elsewhere.
The number of tokens available on Bittrex has steadily declined since last year, with weekly and monthly withdrawals, generally crypto-currencies with low transaction volumes, not replaced by new entrants. On Saturday, the Exchange reported that Apex (APX), Bitcoindark (BTCD), and Mysterium (MYST) would be withdrawn on January 26th. There were few complaints about the loss of BTCD. The crypto-currency privacy market is becoming more and more crowded and it is widely expected that Bittrex will list the Bitcoin Private at Zclassic's fork in the coming weeks.
The removal of Mysterium is literally a mystery, so the developers of the token have sent an e-mail to the Exchange to find out why. The answer was unconvincing,
We encourage you to request the delivery of the token to the market once you have completed and fully implemented the basic application for which you want to use your token and that the application and token can be used by the general public.
To this, the team behind the VPN explained in a blog post: "In accordance with the Bittrex listing policy, they reserve the right to remove a token if its product is not yet implemented, which is the case of Mysterium. Everyone understands that it takes time to build a decentralized VPN with payments (where the token could be used). This is why we are still in negotiations with Bittrex but also in contact with other Exchanges. "
But why Bittrex!?
It seems strange that Bittrex chose Mysterium, a token that was added in June 2017. There are dozens of other tokens that also meet the criteria for belonging to a project that do not work completely. Examples include Enigma and Power Ledger, both of which were added in November 2017. Many more ICO tokens from last year are also far from ready, meaning that their only use is speculative.
The removal of Apex is also amazing; the token hit a record high of $ 30 on Jan. 13, but the bad news from Bittrex dropped it to $ 11. It has been imagined that the removal of MYST, APX, and also Bitshares, a few weeks earlier, may have been an attempt to avoid falling under the yoke of securities law. The American Exchanges are paranoid so they do not have problems with the SEC. Bitfinex has completely ceased operations in the United States, while Bittrex's Token Removal Policy suggests that it is closely monitoring the law.
With 95% of the trading volume of Mysterium and 92% of Apex on Bittrex, both titles were hit hard by the news. Project developers are learning something that Exchange users like Bittrex have known for a long time: too much centralization is a bad thing.