Bitcoiva

Bitcoiva Review

What is Bitcoiva?

Bitcoiva is one of the cryptocurrency exchanges from India. It has been up and running since 2020, so still quite a fresh addition to the crypto exchange market. You can engage in both spot trading and contracts trading here.

Leveraged Trading

With respect to the contracts trading at Bitcoiva, you can use 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).

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 Bitcoiva’s trading platform is also mobile compatible. You can download it from Google Play if you have an Android.

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.

Bitcoiva seems to allow US-investors on its exchange. At least we think so, seeing that we have read Bitcoiva's terms and conditions and not found an explicit prohibition for US-investors to trade here.

Bitcoiva 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 Bitcoiva:

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.

Bitcoiva Fees

Bitcoiva 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.

Bitcoiva charges what we call flat fees, meaning that both the takers and the makers pay the same fee when it comes to spot trading: 0.25%. These spot trading 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%. According to Cryptowisser.com's latest empirical study, the industry average spot trading taker fees were 0.215% and the corresponding spot trading maker fees were 0.162%. 

Relative to industry averages, Bitcoiva charges quite average fees. So not particularly high, but not particularly low either.

Bitcoiva Withdrawal fees

Withdrawal fees are usually fixed and vary from crypto-to-crypto. If you withdraw BTC, you pay a small amount of BTC for the withdrawal. If you withdraw ETH, you pay ETH. The last time we did an empirical study of the BTC-withdrawal fees in the crypto exchange market, we found that the average BTC-withdrawal fee was 0.0006 BTC per BTC-withdrawal.

Bitcoiva charges 0.0007 BTC per BTC-withdrawal, which is somewhat above the global industry average (being 0.00059 BTC per BTC-withdrawal according to this report). It is above average, but not scaringly so.

Deposit Methods

In addition to depositing cryptocurrency to the platform, Bitcoiva also lets you deposit fiat currency. However, only through wire transfer (not credit or debit card).

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