ItBit

ItBit Review

What is ItBit?

itBit is an American cryptocurrency exchange. As such, the exchange naturally permits trading from US-investors. The exchange proudly declares on its website that its global network of institutional and individual traders hail from over 100 countries worldwide. This allegedly provides great depth to the order book of the exchange.

Cooperation with Paxos

On 25 March 2019, the exchange announced that it would strengthen its connection with the company Paxos. Paxos is the company behind itBit and several other products that enable the movement of digital assets. The exchange is currently working on making it easier for its users to access more of their products with only one login.

ItBit Advantages

Two of the advantages that itBit promotes with the trading platform on its website is deep liquidity and transparent pricing. These advantages are naturally very important. On 23 March 2020, two months before the Bitcoin Halving event, itBit's trading volume was only USD 2.8 million. Since then, the exchange's trading volume has increased dramatically. On the date of last updating this review (2 December 2021), the trading volume was around USD 53.7 million. This makes the liquidity decent, but there is still room for improvement.

The exchange also states that takers get “the lowest fees in the industry”. This statement is untrue. However, the maker fees are quite low here.

Finally, the exchange also states that it has strong security. The basis for this is that the exchange has multiple layers of platform security coupled with “100% crypto asset cold storage”. For a centralized exchange, we can’t understand how 100% cold storage is possible. The assets you can trade most at least be “hot”? Generally, we are a bit hesitant to the way that itBit presents the reasons for choosing to open an account with them.

itBit 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 itBit:

itBit Fees

itBit Trading fees

Most crypto exchanges charge two different types of trading fees: taker fees and maker fees. The taker is the person who picks up an existing order from the order book. The maker, on the other hand, is the person who creates an order that is not immediately matched against an existing order on the order book. Makers are often rewarded for creating liquidity on the platform by a lower trading fee than takers. Exchanges that do not make a distinction between takers and makers charge what we call “flat fees”. ItBit charges 0.35% for takers and -0.03% for makers.

According to the largest and most recent empirical study on crypto exchange trading fees, the average spot trading taker fee is currently 0.221% and the average spot trading maker fee is currently 0.177%.

Compared to those average trading fees, ItBit's taker fee and maker fee is above the industry average.

itBit Withdrawal fees

This exchange only charges the network fees when you withdraw cryptocurrencies. This means that if you withdraw BTC, you’ll have to pay a fixed fee of approx. 0.000051 BTC. Only charging the network fees is quite competitive, but there are also exchanges out there that cover the network fees themselves.

Deposit Methods

This exchange offers wire transfer as a deposit method. Credit card, however, is not an available deposit method.

itBit Security

It can be worth noting here that itBit proudly states on its website that 100% of the client-assets are in cold storage.