CoinFLEX

CoinFLEX Review

What is CoinFLEX?

CoinFLEX is a cryptocurrency exchange registered in the Seychelles. It has been active since 2019. CoinFLEX is an exchange spun off from Coinfloor and was co-founded by Mark and Sudhu. The platform is most known for having launched the world's first physically delivered crypto futures exchange, being the first exchange to launch crypto spreads and repo markets that are allowing people to capture yield and perpetual traders to take delivery.

The platform recently launched flexUSD, an interest yield bearing stablecoin, and PNT (promissory note tokens) tokenizing uncollateralized debt for trading firms. 

Affiliate Program

CoinFLEX has an affiliate program. Through this program, you can earn up to 40% commissions on CoinFLEX's trading fees generated from the futures and spot trading of your referrals. 40% is an attractive commission level relative to the industry standards. You can sign up to the affiliate program here.

Derivatives Trading

This exchange is a so called derivatives exchange, meaning that they focus on derivatives trading. 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 engage in derivatives trading connected to many different cryptos here.

CoinFLEX also offers leveraged trading to its users. They offer both perpetuals (i.e., futures without expiry dates) and futures with expiry dates. The maximum leverage level here is offered for spreads trading, where you can leverage your trade with 250x (i.e., 250 times the relevant amount).

A word of caution might be useful for someone contemplating leveraged trading. Leveraged trading can lead to massive returns but – on the contrary – also to equally massive losses.

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).

CoinFLEX 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 CoinFLEX:

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.

CoinFLEX Fees

CoinFLEX 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.

This platform charges takers 0.10% per trade on the spot market, which is quite in line with industry average for the newer modern exchanges. However, according to the biggest study ever performed on crypto exchange trading fees, the industry average taker fee was found to be 0.213%. So in comparison with that, CoinFLEX is far below industry average. Makers receive a 50% discount on their trading fees compared to takers and only pay 0.05% on the spot market. The corresponding figures for contracts trading are 0.06% for takers and -0.02% for makers. These fees are also discounted even further if you hold FLEX-tokens, the exchange's native token, as follows: 

CoinFLEX 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.

CoinFLEX doesn't charge anything for crypto withdrawals, but not only that, they also cover the network fees involved when making a withdrawal. This is actually quite unusual. Many exchanges say "we don't charge any withdrawal fees", but the user still has to pay network fees to the miners processing the withdrawal (which are distinct from the exchange itself). CoinFLEX explicitly says on its website that:

"Withdrawals of BTC, BCH, FLEX Coin and DOT are free for users – CoinFLEX covers all fees involved."

This is very consumer friendly indeed.

Deposit Methods and US-investors

Deposit Methods

In order to trade here, you must have cryptocurrency to begin with. The only asset class you can deposit to CoinFLEX is cryptocurrency. However, if you really like CoinFLEX but you don’t have any crypto yet, you can easily start an account with an exchange that has “fiat on-ramps” (an exchange where you can deposit regular cash), buy crypto there, and then transfer it from such exchange to this exchange. Use our Exchange Filters to easily see which platforms that allow wire transfer or credit card deposits.

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.

CoinFLEX does not allow US-investors on its exchange. So if you’re from the US and would like to engage in crypto trading, you will have to look elsewhere. Luckily for you, if you go to the Exchange List and use our exchange filters, you can sort the exchanges based on whether or not they accept US-investors.