BaseFEX.com Review – Scam or Not?
BaseFEX is a secure and reliable platform to trade perpetual contracts for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular cryptocurrencies with up to 100x leverage. The variety of features on BaseFEX make the platform one of the most useful place to trade with crypto derivatives – according to their site. Is this really the truth? Let’s see.
Review Contents
- About the Company
- Services offered on BaseFEX
- Deposits & Withdrawals
- Available Order Types
- Fees
- User experience and support on BaseFEX
- Supported Trading Pairs
- Exchange Security
- Supported Countries
- Conclusion
About BaseFEX
BaseFEX is a cryptocurrency derivative exchange developed by professionals from the IT and financial industries. Their vision is to use cutting-edge technologies to deliver the best possible service and user experience on the market. BaseFEX’s mission is to provide a reliable, transparent and advanced cryptocurrency derivative trading option on the exchange to make trading smooth, secure and accessible for everyone worldwide.
The company behind BaseFEX is Base Investing Corporation, a registered company on Seychelles with registration number 205276, but the exact company address is not known. The team is working from Hong Kong according to the information available on other sources.
The trading platform is lead by two individuals, Jesse Wu listed as the Chief Executive Officer and Issac Zeng is the Chief Technology officer of BaseFEX. Jesse Wu is a software engineer, a serial entrepreneur and a veteran trader of stock, forex & crypto, both in spot and futures markets. His friend, Isaac Zeng, a software engineer as well who programmed the matching engine of Huobi exchange. They decided to start a company together to solve the issue that they have not found satisfying cryptocurrency futures exchange
BaseFEX is not really active on social media channels, they only run a Twitter account with a couple hundred of followers where they are posting infrequently. In addition to this, they have an official blog where they share announcements related to their services, like launching new trading pairs or perpetual contracts. This is a relatively low level of communication compared to other exchange providers. But you can read a lot about the various contracts and trading instrument under references.
Services offered on BaseFEX
The exchange platform offers up to 100x leverage on Bitcoin and also high leverage on other altcoin contracts. Their trading engine is capable to handle a high amount of transactions.
BaseFEX is a futures trading platform where you can trade Bitcoin and altcoin future contracts with high leverage. The positions are settled in Bitcoin, even in case of altcoin contracts. A futures contracts is a derivative product where you agree to buy or sell cryptocurrency at a previously determined price at a set of time in the future. BaseFEX futures are cash settled, directly in Bitcoin. This is not CFD trading or trading with Bitcoin.
Futures contract does not need 100% collateral as margin which lets you trade on leverage. All margins are denominated in Bitcoin, allowing you to speculate using only cryptocurrencies.
Perpetual contracts are tracking the price of Bitcoin live. Compared to futures contracts, Perpetual Contracts do not have an expiry date so that there is no settlement at the end. Perpetual Contracts have a Funding Rate that is updated in every eight hours. While holding the positions of Perpetual Contracts, you will pay or receive funding over this time automatically. Funding occurs every 8 hours at 02:00 UTC + every 8 hours every day. You only pay or receive the funding when you hold a position at one of these times. If you close your position before the funding exchange, you will not pay or receive funding. The Funding Rate has two parts: the Interest Rate and the Premium/Discount. The purpose of it is to keep the traded price of your Perpetual Contract in line with the underlying reference price. Refer to their funding rate calculation for more information if you are planning to do leverage trading at BaseFEX.
The platform supplies various data for its traders. BaseFEX supply 11 different indices which track the standardized prices of altcoins, removing the noises from the market.
You can see the historical funding rates for each trading pair which helps you to calculate your cost of leverage trading. BaseFEX uses a daily insurance fund to take over your unfilled positions before they are taken over by the Auto-Deleveraging System. The Insurance Fund comes from liquidations executed with a price better than the bankruptcy price of that position. You can follow the daily balance of this fund too.
If you like fame, try to get onto the top 25 traders list which is showing the rankings by profit percentages. Similarly, you can get to the affiliate leaderboard and earn money by referring others to the platform.
Getting started on BaseFEX (Deposits & Withdrawals)
To register at BaseFEX, you need to provide an email, a password and a nickname you would like to use on the trading platform.
Upon registration, you receive a 6 digit code which lets you log in to your account within the next 10 mins.
You can fund your account using the unique Bitcoin address generated for you.
The minimum deposit is 0.0001 BTC (10,000 Satoshi) and your deposit will be credited right after 1 confirmation on the network.
Once you have deposited the amount of money you would like to trade with, you can see the available balance on your dashboard including your leveraged positions.
Withdrawals are also only accepted in Bitcoin. Enter your destination address to the required fields and make sure the address is correct – there is no option to reverse a withdrawal after submitted. Bitcoin network fees are set to 0.0005 BTC.
Trading on BaseFEX (Order Types)
Once you have logged into your account, you can see the chart of the instruments you would like to trade with. In order to engage into a deal, you can select Limit or Market order the middle of the screen.
There are certain conditions you can set, including trigger conditions and leverage which is depending on the trading instrument, for Bitcoin it can be up to 100x, for other altcoins up to 40x.
You can see the orderbook live on the screen along with the recent trades of the instruments.
Your open positions, active orders and order history is listed at the bottom of the page.
Beyond Bitcoin you can trade with the following altcoins at BaseFEX: ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS, BNB.
Fees on BaseFEX
BaseFEX employs a maker-taker fee schedule, where the maker fee is in most cases 0, while the taker fee is 0.07-0.2%. In addition to this, you need to consider the funding rate as well when doing a leveraged deal.
A negative fee means that you will receive a rebate. Funding rates change based on market lending rates.
BaseFEX has an additional fee discount policy for big traders. An account with a total order value of more than 35,000,000 USD in 7 days receives a commission fee discount of 50%.
The platform does not charge any fees on deposits or withdrawals. When you are withdrawing Bitcoin, the minimum Bitcoin Network fee is charged based on blockchain load.
User experience and support on BaseFEX
The platform has a standard, easy to navigate look. You can read the content in six different languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Russian.
BaseFEX is a relatively new exchange, just started its business in 2018. So far there has been no real complaints about their services. In one single case, one of the BitcoinTalk users has raised the content of BaseFEX regarding perpetual contract description matches with the articles listed on another big exchange. All of the claims have been defended by one of the members of BaseFEX as of now and there have been no further complaints about the platform as of now elsewhere. One thing to point out the description of the contracts are indeed very similar and the trading dashboard has some similarities as well.
BaseFEX offers customer service 24/7 through Live Chat, E-Mail, Telegram, and Blog. In case you have any issues they are quickly responding on BitcoinTalk forum as well.
The platform has a mobile-optimized page, so you can access your account and trade with your phone and tablets as well on the go.
Supported Trading Pairs
Security on BaseFEX
BaseFEX uses the best security practices in the industry. Assets are stored 100% in multi-signature cold wallets to avoid any loss even in the case of an unexpected security breach.
You can set two-factor verification on BaseFEX to increase the safety of your account. You can use Google Authenticator or another third party system to secure your account with 2FA.
In the preferences, you can set what are the events you would like to get email notifications (like deposits, withdrawals, login and so on). This helps you to stay in charge of your account no matter what happens.
If you want to trade using bots on the exchange, you can get the API keys of the exchange as well to plug into your trading programs.
Supported Countries
All countries except:
Conclusion
BaseFEX is offering derivative trading opportunity in Bitcoin and 10 other altcoins up to leverage of 100x. There is an opportunity to engage into future contracts and bet on the future price of Bitcoin, all settled directly in cryptocurrency.
You can only deposit and withdraw Bitcoin on the platform, so no KYC is required to open an account, you can start trading with an email address. The site has good promises, as soon as it gets some more users and feedback it can be a good place to continue your trading journey.
Pros
- low fees
- futures trading options
- leverage up to 100x
Cons
- lack of real user experience online
- no social media activity (Twitter suspended)
- users from the US are excluded