Deribit

Deribit Review

What is Deribit?

Deribit Derivatives Exchange is – as you might expect from its name – a derivatives exchange. It is based in the Netherlands and launched in 2016. Deribit offers BTC futures with up to 100x leverage. However, to our knowledge, the exchange does not offer derivatives trading in any other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin.

The exchange announced in January 2020 that it will move its operations from the Netherlands to Panama. This is to avoid the mandates of the coming Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AML 5). The platform will be run by a Panama-based subsidiary of the Dutch Deribit B.V., starting 10 February 2020.

Ownership

This exchange has clear information on the company operating the exchange (Deribit B.V.) and they are also not afraid to show who’s in the team (pictures and biographies of the team members). This is comforting, as it makes it less likely that the exchange is used to defraud customers.

Technology Platform

Another impressive factor with Deribit is their technology platform. The entire framework of the platform has been developed to ensure that it can take care of large numbers of requests with ultra low latency (<1 ms). Very impressive, indeed.

US-investors

Deribit does not explicitly state that US-investors are prohibited from trading. Accordingly, we do believe that US-investors can trade here. Any US-investors interested in trading here should in any event form their own opinion on any issues arising from their citizenship or residency.

Deribit Trading View

Different exchanges have different trading views. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the 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. The below is a picture of the trading view at Deribit:

Deribit Fees

Deribit Trading fees

Every trade occurs between two parties: the maker, whose order exists on the order book prior to the trade, and the taker, who places the order that matches (or “takes”) the maker’s order. We call makers “makers” because their orders make the liquidity in a market.

Deribit charges takers 0.05%. Makers, on the other hand, doesn't have to pay any fees at all (0.00%). This makes Deribit's fee offering quite average compared to the other exchanges focusing on derivatives trading. Many exchanges also give makers a negative trading fee, meaning that makers get paid to create liquidity on the platform.

Deribit Withdrawal fees

Another fee to consider before choosing which exchange to trade at is the withdrawal fee. The withdrawal fee is usually fixed (regardless of the amount of cryptocurrency units withdrawn), and varies from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency. The global industry average withdrawal fee is 0.00053 BTC as per our Q3 2021 Empirical Fee Study.

Here, at Deribit, you only have to pay the network fees, meaning the fees that miners receive to confirm transactions. Only charging network fees is very competitive.

Deposit Methods

This exchange does not accept any deposits of fiat currency. It only deals with Bitcoin. This means that new cryptocurrency investors (i.e., investors without any previous holdings of cryptocurrencies) can’t trade here. In order to purchase your first cryptocurrencies, you need a so called entry-level exchange, which is an exchange accepting deposits of fiat currency. Find one by using our Exchange Finder!

Deribit Security

The exchange prodly noted (on 6 May 2019) that they have 95% of all assets in cold storage, and that it has not lost a single dime of customer funds since its inception. However, when updating this review on 10 July 2019, the platform claimed to have 99% of all assets in cold storage. This is a very good percentage and is definitely a strong benefit with this trading platform.