All reviews
A crypto exchange guide must provide reviews of all of the top crypto exchanges out there, so that you can find the right one for you. This review of Deribit consists of four parts: general info, fees, deposit methods and security.
General Info
Deribit Derivatives Exchange is – as you might expect from its name – a derivatives exchange. It is based in the Netherlands and launched in 2016. Netherlands, the home of Gouda cheese and tulips, is also the home of many cryptocurrency exchanges. There are too many to mention them all here, but the list includes LiteBit.eu, Bitonic and Bitrush.
The exchange announced in January 2020 that it will move its operations from the Netherlands to Panama. This is to avoid the mandates of the coming Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AML 5). The platform will be run by a Panama-based subsidiary of the Dutch Deribit B.V., starting 10 February 2020.
This exchange has clear information on the company operating the exchange (Deribit B.V.) and they are also not afraid to show who’s in the team (pictures and biographies of the team members). This is comforting, as it makes it less likely that the exchange is used to defraud customers.
Deribit offers BTC futures with up to 100x leverage. However, to our knowledge, the exchange does not offer derivatives trading in any other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin.
Another impressive factor with Deribit is their technology platform. The entire framework of the platform has been developed to ensure that it can take care of large numbers of requests with ultra low latency (<1 ms). Very impressive, indeed.
US-investors
Deribit does not explicitly state that US-investors are prohibited from trading. Accordingly, we do believe that US-investors can trade here. Any US-investors interested in trading here should in any event form their own opinion on any issues arising from their citizenship or residency.
Deribit 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 Deribit:
Deribit Fees
Deribit Trading fees
Every trade occurs between two parties: the maker, whose order exists on the order book prior to the trade, and the taker, who places the order that matches (or “takes”) the maker’s order. We call makers “makers” because their orders make the liquidity in a market.
Deribit charges takers 0.05%. Makers, on the other hand, doesn't have to pay any fees at all (0.00%). This makes Deribit's fee offering quite average compared to the other exchanges focusing on derivatives trading. Many exchanges also give makers a negative trading fee, meaning that makers get paid to create liquidity on the platform.
Deribit Withdrawal fees
Another fee to consider before choosing which exchange to trade at is the withdrawal fee. The withdrawal fee is usually fixed (regardless of the amount of cryptocurrency units withdrawn), and varies from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency. The global industry average withdrawal fee is arguably around 0.0008 BTC when you withdraw BTC, but we see more and more changes that have started charging 0.0005 BTC per withdrawal. 0.0005 BTC is thus establishing itself as the new industry average.
Here, at Deribit, you only have to pay the network fees, meaning the fees that miners receive to confirm transactions. Only charging network fees is very competitive.
