AOFEX

AOFEX Review

What is AOFEX?

AOFEX is a cryptocurrency exchange with its head offices in London, United Kingdom, and it also has offices in Singapore. It has been active since 2019.

According to information on its website, they already have 1.56 million users, out of which 100,000 are active daily, and they offer trading in more than 370 tarding pairs. These numbers are very impressive.

AOFEX Mobile Support

Most crypto traders feel that desktop give the best conditions for their trading. The computer has a bigger screen, and on bigger screens, more of the crucial information that most traders base their trading decisions on can be viewed at the same time. The trading chart will also be easier to display. However, not all crypto investors require desktops for their trading. Some prefer to do their crypto trading via their mobile phone. Fortunately for them, AOFEX is also available as a mobile application (both for iPhones and Androids).

Liquidity

On the date of first writing this review (15 June 2021), the platform's 24 hour trading volume according to Coinmarketcap was an impressive USD 270 million. In the short span, this trading volume increased significantly. According to Coinmarketcap, the 24-hour trading volume on 2 December 2021, the date of last updating this review, was USD 1.2 billion.

Leveraged Trading

For its crypto derivatives products, AOFEX allows you to trade with leverage. This means that you can receive a higher exposure towards a certain crypto’s price increase or decrease, without actually holding the necessary amount of assets. You do this by “leveraging” your trade. In simple terms, this means that you borrow from the exchange to bet more. 

Leveraged trades are risky though. For instance, let’s say that you have 100 USD in your trading account and you bet this amount on BTC going long (i.e., going up in value). If BTC then increases in value with 10%, you would have earned 10 USD. If you had used 100x leverage, your initial 100 USD position becomes a 10,000 USD position so you instead earn an extra 1,000 USD (990 USD more than if you had not leveraged your deal). However, the more leverage you use, the smaller the distance to your liquidation price becomes. This means that if the price of BTC moves in the opposite direction (goes down for this example), then it only needs to go down a very small percentage for you to lose the entire 100 USD you started with. Again, the more leverage you use, the smaller the opposite price movement needs to be for you to lose your investment. So, as you might imagine, the balance between risk and reward in leveraged deals is quite fine-tuned (there are no risk free profits).

AOFEX Trading View

Every trading platform has a trading view. The trading view is the part of the exchange’s website where you can see the price chart of a certain cryptocurrency and what its current price is. There are normally also buy and sell boxes, where you can place orders concerning the relevant crypto, and, at most platforms, you will also be able to see the order history (i.e., previous transactions involving the relevant crypto). Everything in the same view on your desktop. There are of course also variations to what we have now described. This is the trading view at AOFEX:

It is up to you – and only you – to decide if the above trading view is suitable for you. Finally, there are usually many different ways in which you can change the settings to tailor the trading view after your very own preferences.

AOFEX Fees

AOFEX Trading fees

Every time you place an order, the exchange charges you a trading fee. The trading fee is normally a percentage of the value of the trade order. Many exchanges divide between takers and makers. Takers are the one who “take” an existing order from the order book.

AOFEX charges what we call flat fees, meaning that both the takers and the makers pay the same fee. In this case, that fee starts at 0.20%. These fees can be considered industry average. In the largest and most recent empirical study performed on industry average crypto trading fees, we found that the industry average spot trading taker fee was 0.215% and the corresponding spot trading maker fee was 0.162%. 

Furthermore, their already quite competitive trading fees are reduced as your trading volume during the preceding 30-day period increases. If you would be one of the crypto whales out there and trade for more than USD 1 billion during the preceding 30-day period, you would be able to reduce your trading fees down to 0.01% in taker fees and 0.00% in maker fees. We imagine that very few traders reach such volumes though. But even if you're preceding 30-day trading volume is only USD 20,001, you get some discount. The details are set out in the below table: 

AOFEX Withdrawal fees

We have not been able to find any information on this exchange’s withdrawal fees. This is potentially a risk for you as an investor. Whenever an exchange does not inform of a fee, there is a higher risk that such fee is high. As soon as we receive information on the withdrawal fees at AOFEX, we will update this review and post them here.

Deposit Methods and US-investors

Deposit Methods

At this exchange, you can purchase crypto through credit or debit cards, but not wire transfer. This can be helpful especially for newer crypto investors who want a broad selection of available deposit methods. Many exchanges offer no fiat currency deposit method at all so AOFEX does distinguish itself somewhat by also offering card payment possibilities.

US-investors

Why do so many exchanges not allow US citizens to open accounts with them? The answer has only three letters. S, E and C (the Securities Exchange Commission). The reason the SEC is so scary is because the US does not allow foreign companies to solicit US investors, unless those foreign companies are also registered in the US (with the SEC). If foreign companies solicit US investors anyway, the SEC can sue them. There are many examples of when the SEC has sued crypto exchanges, one of which being when they sued EtherDelta for operating an unregistered exchange. Another example was when they sued Bitfinex and claimed that the stablecoin Tether (USDT) was misleading investors. It is very likely that more cases will follow.

According to information we have received, US-investors are indeed permitted to trade at AOFEX. Any US-investors should however also form their own opinion on this, as various state rules could also be an obstacle in their cryptocurrency trading.