The trading engine for BitMEX has come back online after a “major outage” shut it down for a few hours.
BitMEX, a derivative trading platform and cryptocurrency exchange, found itself trending on Twitter in the United States earlier on May 19 due to the shutdown.
Going dark, outage still under investigation
The exchange announced that the trading engine was down at 12:13 UTC earlier on May 19. After some investigation, BitMEX announced at 13:29 UTC that the platform was coming back online with cancel-only mode operating at first.
We can confirm trading resumed at 13:40 UTC. For official updates please follow https://t.co/fVa1FAqSEW and https://t.co/W9CnyDdlds.
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) May 19, 2020
The cryptocurrency exchange noted that all funds were “safe” and that no liquidations occurred during the downtime. Trading then resumed at 13:40 UTC with withdrawals being processed at 14:00 UTC and 15:00 UTC.
They added:
“Due to the downtime, the period between 12:00 and 13:40 UTC is being excluded for funding rate calculations on perpetual swaps.”
Once the platform went live and operating at full capacity, BitMEX stated that a full postmortem would be carried out and released to the public in the next few days.
Rough past few days for BitMEX
This outage of their trading engine is just the latest in a string of negative circumstances for the cryptocurrency exchange.
BitMEX was hit with a lawsuit in the United States on May 18 that alleges the exchange engages in a multitude of sins, including racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud.
The lawsuit also says a full 15% of cryptocurrency trades on BitMEX in 2019 came from U.S.-based traders despite the fact the exchange does not have the appropriate license to allow such trading.
The exchange disputes the allegations, with a spokesperson stating:
“Having reviewed a draft version of their complaint, which is clearly rehashed from information culled from the internet, we confirm we will be defending ourselves vigorously against this spurious claim.”
The exchange was recently forced to restrict access to users in Japan due to increased cryptocurrency regulations enforced by the country’s Financial Services Agency (FSA).
At the start of this month, any new user would not be allowed to make any trades on the platform and older users would not be able to “open a new position or increase an existing open position” going forward.
BitMEX launches ETH/USD quanto futures contract
However, not all is doom and gloom for BitMEX.
The cryptocurrency exchange launched an ETH/USD quanto futures contract with up to 50x leverage on May 5, which would expire in June.
We will be bringing another new product to our platform with the launch of an ETHUSD quanto futures contract on 05 May 2020. More details on our blog: https://t.co/1LgME2IfA6 pic.twitter.com/elHFv5iyst
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) April 24, 2020
The exchange says that this product is the first of its kind in the marketplace.
BitMEX also added that the new product allows crypto traders “to long or short the ETH/USD exchange rate without ever touching either ETH or USD.”
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