Bybit.com Review 2023 – Pros and Cons of Trading on Bybit

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Since its inception, the crypto margin trading platform Bybit has evolved from a simple pure crypto-based trading platform to a more complex crypto finance service provider. Now, buying and selling cryptocurrencies via integrated fiat currency service providers and cryptocurrency savings & staking accounts round out the offerings of the reputable trading platform.

About the Company

The Bybit cryptocurrency broker platform is operated by the Bybit Fintech Limited which is registered on the British Virgin Islands, with headquarters in Singapore. The company was launched in March 2018, making it still a fairly young player on the crypto market.

The company has about 90 employees, all of whom joined within a year. The development team created the trading platform in just over half a year, knowing that the system had to be as close to perfect as can be.

This is because no mistakes are allowed to happen when traders with high stakes risk a lot of money on a derivatives trading platform, not even in the area of cryptocurrency. As ByBit is focused on the more experienced traders, the platform has grown in a short time to become a well-known name on this highly competitive market.

Experienced traders are especially charmed by the platform’s high speed performance. According to ByBit’s own statements they can handle 100,000 transactions per second. This has the advantage that you lose as little money as possible when trading, which can otherwise happen on overloaded platforms. With it’s high technical standard, the platform is ready for the future. Due to the ever increasing popularity of crypto trading all brokers will become busier and busier, which means that many transactions per second are no superfluous luxury.

Especially in terms of functionalities, ByBit distinguishes itself from the rest. This way you can trade on margin on the platform. With some cryptocurrencies it’s even possible to use leverage of up to 1:100. This means that you would only have to deposit 0.01 BTC to be able to open a 1 BTC position. With leverage you can still make a lot of profit with only a small investment, but you can also lose your margin just as quickly. With leverage of 1:100 this is certainly the case which is why professional traders usually never use it to that extend. With this amount of leverage the liquidation price will just be too close to your entry, so it’s hard not to get liquidated in that case.

In fact, most pro traders use a formula that calculates the position size based on their stake in relation to the amount they are willing to lose in one trade. Leverage in general is a functionality for the more experienced trader, and high leverage is rather for the gambler.

The fact that ByBit is especially suitable for experienced traders doesn’t mean that there is no support available. If you have any questions, you can contact them 24/7 via a live chat on the website. The live chat is fully in English as ByBit is not offered in other languages. It is even possible to ask questions to their CEO on Twitter. So ByBit is a very open platform, a fact that makes them seem trustworthy and reliable, more than many other trading sites.

In summer 2019, the platform already counts 100 thousand registered users, with new sign ups coming in every day. Currently Bybit is one of the most popular alternatives to BitMEX.

Crypto Products offered by Bybit

Altcoin Trading (on High Leverage)

Bybit offers perpetual crypto derivative contracts on Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and Ripple against USD. It means that by performing a trade, you are not buying an underlying asset, but enter an agreement with the seller for the future price of a given asset.

In order to trade any of the products offered by this platform, you will have to deposit either BTC, ETH, EOS, or XRP, after which Bybit will calculate your available margin, shown in USD.

This margin can be used to enter a short or long position on every currency pair available: BTC/USD, ETH/USD, EOS/USD, and XRP/USD with a maximum leverage of x100.

Bybit Trading Pairs With Leverage:

• BTC/USD: 1:100
• ETH/USD: 1:50
• EOS/USD: 1:50
• XRP/USD: 1:50

Earn Accounts – Saving & Staking

Offering savings and staking accounts now seems to be a lucrative business, as more and more crypto trading platforms are incorporating this service into their portfolio. Thus, users can now also refrain from high-risk margin trading at Bybit and make profits from the much less risky savings accounts. These profits are of course significantly lower than the profits that successful trades can mean, but they are guaranteed by the platform within a predefined framework. However, in times of extreme rising inflation of the US dollar (and other world currencies), many investors see this as a way to diversify their assets.

The handling of the Bybit Savings and Staking accounts is simple, intuitive and self-explanatory. All you need to do is own a minimum amount of crypto coins of a corresponding savings offer and then you can store them within the Bybit savings account and let them earn interest. Fixed or flexible savings plans can be chosen, with different terms that can even be as short as a few days.

An interesting product is the Bybit Launchpool, where users can stake a token and receive another token as an interest payment. This way you can get new tokens without having to buy them.

Buy and Sell Cryptocurrencies

A big weakpoint of crypto margin trading platform used to be that users already had to own cryptourrencies in order to start using the platform. This is why Bybit is partnering with fiat-based financial service providers that allow direct crypto purchases on the bybit platform. For this purpose, however, users need to do full ID verification, which is otherwise not directly necessary. So users don’t have to use a cryptocurrency exchange platform first in order to get cryptocurrencies before they can start trading and earning on ByBit.com.

Signup on ByBit – No KYC / ID Verification

With ByBit you don’t have to do this. Only an email address is sufficient for ByBit. If you signup with your mobile you need to fill in your country, phone number and password. Creating an account on ByBit is very easy and that’s mainly because ByBit doesn’t need too much data from traders. What you’ll notice with a lot of brokers and exchanges, is that you have to verify some data before you can start. This is especially with traditional regulated brokers, but also with a range of new cryptocurrency brokers.

After activating your account via e-mail you can get started right away. It might give you a bit of a strange feeling, but actually a specialized cryptocurrency broker doesn’t need anything else from you, at least below certain withdrawal limits.

2 BTC daily withdrawal for unverified Users

With Bybit you can withdraw cryptocurrency worth up to 2 BTC (=2 entire Bitcoins!) daily. Only if you need higher withdrawal limits, ID verification is required. So big position traders might need to verify their identity through the form shown below.

You can read below why ByBit doesn’t need your bank details.

Demo Mode

In its early days Bybit was offering a testnet trading account, so new users could check out the trading platform safely before trading with real money. This was a great feature we always appreciate with Bitcoin brokers. Unfortunately this feature seems to have disappeared, so traders have to start testing the platform with real money, but at least this can be a tiny amount only since there is no minimum deposit.

Bybit Welcome Bonuses

Bybit permanently offers welcome bonuses for the frist trade in the spot markets and derivatives markets, however the amount may vary.

Restrictions

For legal reasons there are certain countries or regions that cannot be served by Bybit. Unfortunately, those are the USA, Québec (Canada), Cuba, Singapore, Crimea, Sevastopol, Syria, Iran, Sudan, China and North Korea. So if you live in one of those countries, unfortunately you’re not allowed to trade on Bybit.

How does ByBit work?

It is good to know in advance that you can only use cryptocurrency to access ByBit. So you can’t execute trades with USD or Euros to convert them into Bitcoin, for example.

If you want to start using ByBit and you don’t have any cryptocurrency yet, then you’ll first have to go to an exchange to buy Bitcoin or one of the other cryptocurrencies accepted for deposit on Bybit.

With ByBit you can make trades like you might know from BitMEX. At ByBit it is possible to deposit BTC, ETH, EOS or XRP in order to start trading. So it isn’t possible to directly deposit fiat money such as USD, EUR, GBP etc. If you don’t have cryptocurrency yet, you can buy some from CoinMama, BitPanda, LocalBitcoins, Coinbase or another exchange of your choice. The term you have to look for is spot trading, other than CFD trading. Spot trading means you actually exchange one foreign currency against another, so you actually purchase a currency (or, in our case: cryptocurrency). At CFD trading you only trade price differences of 2 currencies, but you only keep one type of asset. The amount of this asset will get enhanced or reduced, depending on the success or failure of your trades.

For each trade in Bybit you can set a leverage and you can indicate whether you want to go long or short. Each trade on ByBit happens through two parties. One party is the maker. A maker places an order in the order book for the future. So a maker will also make sure that the trading platform has money in its hands and will provide liquidity within the broker. A maker receives a reward for this. You can read more about this below. The other party is the taker, who places an order equal to that of the maker. So in short – a maker creates the order book and a taker takes a transaction out of the order book.

Here are the leverage details for BTC and ETH positions:

BTC leverage:

ETH leverage:

Protection From Market Manipulation

The broker is protected from market manipulation by using a dual price mechanism. This means that the price at which traders can be liquidated depends on the mark price. The mark price is an average price of certain large exchanges.

Deposit and Withdrawal

Minimum Amounts:

There is no minimum deposit for BTC, ETH, EOS and XRP. So on this crypto margin broker you can even trade with tiny amounts, which is a good idea if your are a margin trading beginner. But they do have minimum withdrawal amounts you might need to know – however, even those are really low:

• Bitcoin: 0.002BTC
• Ethereum: 0.02ETH
• EOS: 0.2EOS
• Ripple: 20XRP

Maximum Withdrawal:

The maximum amount you can cash out at once is 10 BTC. Withdrawals are processed manually 3 times a day. So you could withdraw 30 Bitcoin per day in total.

Trading Fees

We’ve just been talking about makers and takers. As a taker you pay a 0.075% fee of your total trading amount to ByBit. As a maker you will receive a 0.025% discount on that amount. If you have closed all your trades and for example you want to withdraw your Bitcoin from your account to your own wallet, you’ll pay the small transaction fee that goes to the BTC miners.

Bybit itself doesn’t charge any fees on deposits and withdrawals. The current mining fees on deposits and withdrawals are stated here.

Critics of Bybit

Bybit suffers from the same kind of critics as other exchanges operating under the same business model. First of all, the exchange itself doesn’t require you to go through the KYC process, and because of the regulatory reasons, U.S citizens are not accepted. What is more, Bybit is not as liquid as some bigger exchanges, which might lead to some problems if you are planning to trade bigger positions.

As the platform operates only on crypto deposits that are the base for your margin, combining that with a maximum leverage of x100 might lead to some unforeseen consequences. Traders entering a heavily leveraged long position might get quickly liquidated, as the value of the available margin decreases, with the underlying asset increases in the value at the same time.

Funding Fees

Bybit has the same funding fee standard most competitors use: Every 8 hours there is a point where open positions get charged the so called funding fee. This fee gets directly exchanges between traders, so it’s nothing the broker will earn. The fee is dynamically calculated and depending on market conditions it’s either longs pay shorts or the other way round. The time intervals are 8:00 UTC, 16:00 UTC, 0:00 UTC. Funding fees only affect positions being held over those time stamps. If you close a positions one minute before or open a new one right afterwards, you’re not affected.

Our Verdict on Bybit

ByBit is seen by many traders as a robust and reliable platform. So there is no need to be discouraged by the missing verification process. In fact, anonymous (KYC-free) trading is what many traders prefer so they specifically look for crypto brokers with no KYC.

ByBit offers good support for users and it is available around the clock. The possibility to ask the CEO of the company questions via his own Twitter account shows that it is a transparent company. That’s what we like to see in the crypto world.

The platform is made for experienced traders. As with many other platforms, it is possible to first get acquainted with the system via a demo environment. So you can take a look around to see what the dashboard looks like before you really start. A function we didn’t expect, but certainly a pleasant surprise.