Bitex

Bitex Review

What is Bitex?

Bitex is an exchange that has been active since 2014 and it only offers trading in Bitcoin. If you need to find an exchange offering support for a specific altcoin, you can do so by using the filters in our Cryptocurrency Exchange List.

Argentina or Netherlands?

Bitex’s domicile country is, to our understanding, Argentina. However, it has been registered in the Netherlands. The company owning the exchange is Bitex International C.V. (a company from Argentina), which further supports the assumption that the exchange is indeed from Argentina.

US-investors

Unfortunately for US-investors, Bitex prohibits US-investors from trading on its exchange. So if you are a US-investor and wants to trade here, you can’t and you’ll have to look for one of the other top crypto exchanges.

Bitex Trading View

Different exchanges have different trading view. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the trading views normally have in common is that they all show the order book or at least part of the order book, a price chart of the chosen cryptocurrency and order history. They normally also have buy and sell-boxes. Before you choose an exchange, try to have a look at the trading view so that you can ascertain that it feels right to you. We did not manage to pass the KYC-requirements at this exchange, so we can unfortunately not provide you with a printscreen of their trading face. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

However, here’s how the Bitex-platform presented the Bitcoin price chart on their landing page on 10 June 2019 and also showed volume and the highest bid and ask prices:

Bitex Fees

Bitex Trading fees

Never forget to check the fees of an exchange you are interested in trading at. There are a number of top crypto exchanges who don’t charge different fees between takers and makers. Usually, it is called that such exchanges’ trading fees are “flat”. Bitex offers a flat trading fee of 0.50% and does accordingly not care about whether you are a taker or a maker. For investors who prefer to pick-up existing orders from the order book, this might be an attractive trading fee model.

Bitex’s flat trading fees of 0.50% are above the industry average, which is around 0.25%. One should consider whether this exchange has a strong offering to investors in other respects that outweighs the disadvantage of this somewhat higher trading fee.

In addition, Bitex writes in their terms and conditions (in Spanish) that:

"Los cargos a abonar por el Custodiado serán cobrados por Bitex International CV. Por el presente servicio de custodia el CUSTODIADO abonará al CUSTODIO el 0,5% anual en BTC, con un mínimo de 0.03 BTC anual y un máximo de 0,3 BTC anual. Cuando se trate de custodia de BCH, se cobrará el 0,5% anual, con un mínimo de 0.3 BCH y un máximo de 3 BCH anual."

To our understanding, this means that they - in addition to the trading fees - charge an annual 0.50% "custody fee", regardless of your trading activity or lack of trading activity.

An annual custody fee is very unusual and not consumer-friendly.

Bitex 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 approx. 0.0006 BTC per BTC-withdrawal.

Bitex charges 0.0004 BTC. Accordingly, their withdrawal fees are competitive.

Deposit Methods

The exchange offers wire transfer as a deposit method, but credit cards are not permitted. This might of course be disadvantageous if you would prefer to use your credit card for any reason.