Bidesk

Bidesk Review

What is Bidesk?

Bidesk is a cryptocurrency exchange registered in the British Virgin Islands. It has been up and running since October 2019.

Futures Trading Alongside Spot Trading

In addition to offering regular crypto spot trading, Bidesk also offers trading in crypto futures, which is a type of derivatives. A derivative is an instrument priced based on the value of another asset (normally stocks, bonds, commodities etc). In the cryptocurrency world, derivatives accordingly derive its values from the prices of specific cryptocurrencies. You can trade the following derivatives contracts at Bidesk: BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT and BCH/USDT.

Bidesk 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. If you are one of those traders, you’ll be happy to learn that Bidesk’s trading platform is also mobile compatible. You can download it to/from both the AppStore and Google Play:

Bidesk Fees

Bidesk 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. Makers are the ones who add orders to the order book, thereby making liquidity at the platform.

Bidesk charges what we call flat fees, meaning that both the takers and the makers pay the same fee: 0.10%. These taker fees are quite in line with the global industry averages for centralized exchanges. Sure, industry averages have historically been around 0.20-0.25% but we now see new industry averages emerging around 0.10%-0.15%.

Bidesk also offers trading fee discounts to customers who have reached a certain "customer level". You climb the levels by either achieving a certain trading volume, or holding a certain quantityt of BDK tokens (the exchange's native token). Please refer to Bidesk's website for more info on this. Here are the available trading fee discounts:

Bidesk 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 with respect to 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 Bidesk:

It is up to you – and only you – to decide if the above trading view is suitable to 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.

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.

It is unclear whether Bidesk permits US investors or not. We have read their Terms and Conditions and have not found an explicit prohibition of US investors. We urge any US investors to form their own opinion on the permissibility of their trading at Bidesk though.

Bidesk Withdrawal fees

To our understanding, Bidesk does not charge any fees of their own when you withdraw crypto from your account at the platform. Accordingly, the only fee you have to think about when withdrawing are the network fees. The network fees are fees paid to the miners of the relevant crypto/blockchain, and not fees paid to the exchange itself. Network fees vary from day to day depending on the network pressure. In general though, only paying the network fees should be considered as below global industry average when it comes to fee levels for crypto withdrawals. 

Deposit Methods

Bidesk lets you deposit cryptocurrency assets to the exchange, which is quite standard. However, they also let you purchase and sell crypto via debit and credit cards (and, allegedly, wire transfer). To be more specific, they cooperate with a payment service provider called Moonpay. Through Moonpay, users can use their VISA or MasterCard or wire transfer to purchase or sell cryptocurrency. The rate for using your VISA or MasterCard is 4.50% of the purchase amount, and wire transfer sets you back 1.00% of the purchase amount.

Seeing as fiat currency deposits are at all possible at this trading platform, Bidesk qualifies as an “entry-level exchange”, meaning an exchange where new crypto investors can start their journey into the exciting crypto world.