Bitfinex adds social media to crypto exchange

Founded in 2012, Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange providing for digital currency traders and liquidity providers. It was one of the first professional platforms set up to accommodate for the booming interest in cryptocurrency trading. Bitfinex is the world’s largest exchange by volume for trading Bitcoin against the U.S. Dollar, and claims to be the world’s most advanced cryptocurrency exchange. They also facilitate the trading of many other cryptocurrency assets.

Their platform is made up of 3 core features:

• Exchange Trading: At the heart of Bitfinex are central limit order books for the spot trade of digital tokens. Users can deposit, trade, and withdraw digital tokens.
• Margin Trading: Bitfinex allows qualified users to trade with up to 5x leverage, receiving financing with the help of margin funding and peer-to-peer financing. When opening a financing position, users can manually enter a funding order to receive the desired amount of financing, at the rate and duration of their choice. Alternatively, users can open a financed trading position and Bitfinex will automatically link them with peer-to-peer financing at the current prevailing rate.
• Margin Funding: The P2P financing market provides users with a way to earn interest on their digital assets through lending out their funds to other users who want to trade with leverage.

Pulse is a ‘social trading’ platform that will reportedly “enable users to exchange ideas, interact with each other, and feel the pulse of the exchange’s growing community.” The platform has a similar format to Twitter, with posts being referred to as “pulses.” Users can write, like, and share pulses from other Bitfinex users. At this time, there is no functionality for commenting on pulses.

While Bitfinex is certainly not the first cryptocurrency exchange to have social functionalities, typically competitors will simply have a chat feed for users to interact with each other.

Bitfinex has distinguished Pulse from other exchange-based social platforms by opting for a more professional approach. Users’ accounts can be connected with their Bitfinex leaderboard positions and with their Twitter accounts, giving an air of credibility to traders who are profitable, or have a large online following. The Pulse feed is publicly viewable, so an account is only required if a user wishes to post content.

Bitfinex has been adding features to its exchange at a rapid pace over the past year. Earlier this month, the exchange added staking rewards for popular stakable coins such as Tezos, EOS, and Cosmos. Typically, stakable coins would not earn a return whilst on an exchange, so this addition was a big win for certain users.

The exchange has also added the popular ‘perpetual swap’ derivative contract for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and an upgraded affiliate program within the last year. A public leaderboard was added late last year, and its ability to add Twitter handles to a user’s nickname has led to profitable traders becoming ‘crypto twitter’ famous almost overnight.

In December 2019, Bitfinex added support for the Lightning Network, a decentralized system of smart contracts built as a second-layer of the Bitcoin blockchain that enables custodian-free instant, high-volume micropayments across a network of participants. As a result, users who make deposits to Bitfinex via their lightning network channel can trade with their funds instantly, rather than waiting the typical 30min + for an on-chain transaction to confirm.