ByBit Review – Scam or Not?
About Bybit.com
Bybit is among the absolute top crypto exchanges worldwide in terms of user numbers, trading volumes and professionalism. It counts as particularly trustworthy due to its transparency. One of Bybit’s exceptional features is that it additionally supports account funding with fiat money.
Bybit is a cryptocurrency exchange platform for advanced trading, featuring crypto derivatives, passive income mechanisms and a traditional spot market service. The company was founded in March 2018 with headquarters in Singapore. Additional offices were established in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
After registration and completing KYC verification, users are allowed to exchange crypto assets, which you can keep inside Bybit’s integrated wallet or withdraw to a private address.
Transparent Team
The founding members of the team include professionals from the forex and investment banking industry and all of them are blockchain enthusiasts who adopted the technology early. The technological team has been working for such companies as Morgan Stanley, Tencent, Ping’an Bank and Nuoya Fortune in the past.
ByBit’s co-founder and current CEO is Ben Zhou, a crypto and forex expert from Singapore. Prior to taking up the lead of ByBit, Zhou has been working as the China general manager at a forex and CFD trading platform for a couple of years. If you want to speak directly to the CEO, ByBit encourages users to reach him on Twitter, where he responds to the user’s questions.
Bybit’s verified Social Media:
Supported Languages
The Bybit platform is currently available in 17 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Filipino, Hindi, Ukranian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Kazakh and Turkish. Bybit’s services are accessible through its web plataform and iOS/Android mobile applications.
Bybit ranks #5 among the crypto exchanges with the highest derivatives transaction volume, reaching almost $6 billion, according to live data from Coinmarketcap.
Supported Countries
The Bybit platform is available to all countries globally, with the exception of the United States, Mainland China, Singapore, Quebec (Canada), Ontario (Canada), North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Sudan and any other country that is classified as an excluded jurisdiction.
Bybit Features
Bybit is one of the most complete cryptocurrency exchanges, as their service offers multiple products inside the crypto space.
- Spot trading: Buy and exchange the cryptocurrencies supported by Bybit, which you can keep in the main wallet or withdraw them to a personal wallet. Each cryptocurrency is paired with another, especially with stablecoins. This provides a permanent reference as to it’s value in relation to fiat money.
- Margin trading: Bybit lends you capital to increase your profits by buying and selling crypto assets. Your capital will be used as margin for each position, while you will have to pay small daily interest until you repay the funds.
- Derivatives trading: Experience advanced trading with USDT/USDC perpetual contracts, reverse contracts, options and more. Use leverage to increase the size of your positions and increase your profits.
- Leveraged tokens: Trade without the risk of liquidations. The price of these assets are leveraged, simulating a spot market but with more significant fluctuations, increasing the chances of profit for traders.
- Launchpad: The Launchpad section allows you to invest early in projects supported by Bybit. Subscribe to your favorite projects to get on the list and allocate your funds to the pool. You will receive the tokens in the distribution process.
- Earn Program: A Bybit service that allows you to earn passive income through staking, defi mining, liquidity mining and Bybit savings. Your capital is blocked while you earn a previously agreed percentage.
- NFT Market: Explore the metaverse for collections from multiple artists worldwide. Users can browse through an NFT marketplace where they can purchase their favorite pieces of art.
- P2P trading: Buy or sell cryptocurrencies for your local fiat currency. To ensure transaction transparency, Bybit Bybit holds the funds from the exchange as a security deposit, releasing them when both parties confirm that the order has been carried out successfully.
- Integrated Wallet: The Bybit wallet will allow you to store any of the cryptocurrencies available within the platform. Users receive an address to deposit each active crypto, which they can withdraw at any time.
- Charts and trading tools: The Bybit platform has all the necessary tools to successfully analyze the crypto market, offering charts with different timeframes, technical analysis indicators and more.
Bybit’s Perpetual Contracts
Perpetual contracts are a new, innovative cryptocurrency derivative, which is halfway between spot margin trading and futures trading. They do not have an expiry date, like futures, so traders can hold perpetual contracts as long as they wish to do so. There is a funding mechanism in place which ensures the prices are always up to date and no unnecessary liquidation takes place.
Leverage is offered up to 100x which leaves more than enough room for profit-making. The maintenance margin of the account must be kept always above 0.5% to prevent liquidation. The auto deleveraging mechanism gives an extra layer of protection when large losses are prevented on risky trades if the market moves against the desired direction.
High-Performance Trading Engine
The ByBit matching engine can handle up to 100,000 transactions per seconds, and each matching is completed within only 10 microseconds. The service is running 24/7 in every single day without an error – as you can read later in the security related section, ByBit guarantees uptime all the time and if something goes wrong they even offer compensation for this.
The advanced order system at ByBit lets the traders set up their take-profit and stop-loss orders within just one single click from the order confirmation window. This feature also gives you access to multiple order types and time in force function.
Bybit Demo Trading (Testnet)
On the ByBit testnet, you can try our all the features the platform can offer including the advanced order types, the high margin options and the full features chart provided by TradingView.
How to use Bybit?
Bybit is an exchange platform mostly geared towards experienced traders, although all the processes are highly intuitive and can be mastered over routine.
Sign up for a Bybit Account
Enter your email or phone number, along with a sufficiently secure password. You will need to confirm that you are not a resident of any of the Bybit-restricted countries. Finally, verify your registration through the code that will be sent to your email or phone number.
Consider completing all KYC procedures in order to access all of Bybit’s services.
Deposit or Buy Cryptocurrencies
Go to Bybit’s main wallet and click “Deposit” alongside the cryptocurrency you want to send. Copy the deposit address and choose the network for the transaction. Proceed to make the deposit.
If you don’t have cryptocurrencies yet, you can even fund your account with fiat money since Bybit supports simple bank payments. However, keep in mind that bank transfers to the platform can take up to several business days.
Exchange/Trade Cryptocurrencies
Search through Bybit’s products and choose the one you’re looking for. There are hundreds of available cryptocurrencies in spot market, derivatives and margin trading to start making profits. If you’re interested in NFT markets, you can find the NFT Marketplace in the upper side of the main menu.
Withdraw funds
Access Bybit’s wallet and click on “Withdraw” alongside the cryptocurrency you have. Paste your personal crypto address and match the right network. Proceed to withdraw your funds and confirm your transaction through 2FA.
Withdrawal/Deposit Limits
Bybit will allow larger withdrawals to those users who have completed the necessary KYC processes, while there are no minimum/maximum deposit amounts to the platform wallet.
The withdrawal limits are different for each cryptocurrency. For Bitcoin withdrawals, verified users with level 1 and 2 will be able to withdraw 50-100 BTC, respectively. Unverified users will have a daily withdrawal limit of 2 BTC.
The maximum size of each instant withdrawal from the Bybit wallet is 0.2 BTC, so users will need to make multiple transactions to withdraw larger amounts.
Fees
Deposits are completely free of charges at ByBit. For withdrawals, you only need to pay the miner fee to the network, but ByBit does not charge any additional withdrawal fee.
Bybit’s trading fees work under the market maker/taker structure and the percentage will depend on the user’s verification level.
Spot Trading Fees
- Non-VIP users: Takers and makers pay 0.1%.
- VIP 1 users: Takers pay 0.06% and makers 0.04%.
- VIP 2 users: Takers pay 0.05% and makers 0.02%.
- VIP 3 users: Takers pay 0.04% and makers 0.01%.
- PRO 1 users: Takers pay 0.03% and makers 0%.
- PRO 2 users: Takers pay 0.02% and makers 0%.
- PRO 3 users: Takers pay 0.01% and makers 0%.
Perpetual and Futures Trading
- Non-VIP users: Takers pay 0.06% and makers 0.01%.
- VIP 1 users: Takers pay 0.05% and makers 0.006%.
- VIP 2 users: Takers pay 0.045% and makers 0.004%.
- VIP 3 users: Takers pay 0.0425% and makers 0.002%.
- PRO 1 users: Takers pay 0.04% and makers 0%.
- PRO 2 users: Takers pay 0.035% and makers 0%.
- PRO 3 users: Takers pay 0.03% and makers 0%.
Funding Fee
The funding fee for perpetual contracts occurs every 8 hours, when positions are held over a specific timestamp (00:00, 08:00 and 16:00).
The Funding Fee is calculated from position value multiplied with the funding rate. (The position value is the quantity of the contract divided by the market price).
The funding rate is flat 0.01% for all types of digital assets and updated regularly in every 8 hours. A positive funding rate in your trading history means you have paid a funding rate, while a negative rate means you received funding. ByBit does not pay or receive any of these funding rates.
Supported Fiat Currencies
Bybit uses third party-providers like Banxa, XanPool, MoonPay, Mercuryo, Paxful and Simplex. to process fiat deposits. Currently, the platform supports 59 fiat currencies; AUD, BGN, BRL, CAD, CHF, COP, CZK, DKK, DOP, EGP, EUR, GBP, HKD, HRK, IDR, ILS, INR, JOD, JPY, KES, KRW, KWD, LKR, MAD, MXN, MYR, NGN, NOK, NZD, OMR, PEN, PHP, PKR, PLN, RON, RUB, SEK, SGD, THB, TRY, TWD, UAH, USD, VND, ZAR, ARS, AZN, CLP, CRC, GEL, HUF, KZT, MDL, NAD, UYU, QAR, SAR, AED, and UZS.
Bybit supports Visa and MasterCard credit/debit card payments for buying crypto. Bybit does not charge any fees for this procedure, but the providers do.
Supported Cryptocurrencies
Bybit has a large availability of crypto assets, supporting over 600 cryptocurrencies in its platform. Users will be able to trade coins like BTC, ETH, BNB, CAKE, MATIC, ATOM, EOS, DOGE, SHIB, FIL, FTM, BAT, APE, 1INCH, SOL, ADA, MKR, DOT, XLM, SUSHI, XTZ, SAND, UNI, XRP, WAVES, ZEC, ZIL, YFI and many more.
KYC Verification
KYC verification procedures are fundamental to get the most out of Bybit. The higher the verification level the user achieves, the more benefits he can draw from the platform. This process should take about 15 minutes.
Submit a photo of your passport and a selfie holding it to verify your identity in the exchange’s database. This will allow you to access all the features of products like Earn and expand your limits within the platform. Verification can take up to 48 hours to be processed.
Ease of Use and Interface
Although the Bybit platform has many products that are better suited to the needs of experienced traders, the interface is very easy to operate and all terms are clearly explained.
Bybit’s main page has shortcuts to all sections of the exchange, so users will be able to browse through each product and find out what it is.
The fact that Bybit supports 17 languages makes it very easy for users from all over the world to enter, allowing them to use all available services in their native languages.
Inexperienced users can check out the Bybit tutorial guide and explore the exchange’s services at a deeper level. This section has videos regarding all the features within the platform.
Security
Bybit is a custodial crypto-exchange, which means that your cryptocurrencies and private keys are kept by the company. However, Bybit uses the cold-storage mechanism to safeguard 100% of user funds, thus preventing them from being stolen in a direct attack on the platform.
Digital assets collection and withdrawal are done through offline signatures to ensure secured access.
The withdrawal review includes all blockchain deposit records, transaction records, individuals account balances and platform account balances, to safeguard the asset security of the users and the platform. In order to create a positive user experience, they have invested in more human resources to conduct withdrawals 3 times per day.
In order to strengthen the security of each account, Bybit requires users to set a strong password and activate Google Authenticator and 2FA.
Users can set anti-phishing codes to avoid falling victim to email phishing attacks. Bybit has never been hacked in the past, which increases the user’s trust in Bybit’s security mechanisms.
Daily Insurance Fund Balance
ByBit uses an Insurance Fund to mitigate the losses on contracts caused by extreme market conditions, where the liquidation occurred too widespread. Current amount of the insurance fund is about 189 million USD.
Customer Support
Users will be able to contact a bot on the platform to ask short questions and receive information about any Bybit product. Click on the headphone symbol on the main page to launch the live chat.
For concerns and issues within the platform, users can email support@bybit.com. Even though both community support mechanisms exist, many users have complained about poor customer service from the exchange.
In any case, users should communicate their complaints directly to the e-mail service immediately, thus shortening the waiting time for a response from the Customer Support team.
User Experience
Despite the fact that Bybit is a highly trusted platform worldwide, many users have been inconvenienced by not reviewing the Terms and Conditions of the exchange, resulting in losses and misunderstandings in certain transactions and purchases. It is recommended to carefully read the Terms section before accessing Bybit services, specifically to know the necessary conditions for each transaction, as well as your options according to your verification level.
Other than that, Bybit has very positive reviews from users who have been able to take advantage of its services judiciously. Currently, the exchange maintains a score of 2.3/5 on its TrustPilot page.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Hundreds of supported cryptocurrencies.
- Multiple trading products and markets.
- Transparent company background
- Fair commission rates.
- Highly-intuitive crypto exchange platform.
- Multiple passive income mechanisms.
- Offers promotions and prices for trading.
Cons
- Poor customer support service.
- Custodial crypto exchange platform (KYC).
- Can be tricky for starting traders.
- There are many complaints towards Bybit’s policies.
- Trading pairs are very limited, compared to other crypto exchange platforms.
- Bybit is an unregulated service.