ICBIT

ICBIT is a universal trading platform which has a few sections. Right now, the currency exchange is live and futures market is in closed testing stage.

This exchange is said to be founded by Fireball and DeepBit by combining best practices in high-performance trading and Bitcoin experience.

Technically ICBIT is not an exchange since it does not act as a central counterparty. According to their website users are fully exposed to counterparty risk from other traders whose identities are concealed from them; the exchange does not pledge its own assets to back the other side of a customer's position. Traders are not allowed to conduct background or reputation checks of any kind on these anonymous counterparties.

Features

For its currency exchange section ICBIT makes an accent on the following:

• State-of-the-art technologies usage. Instead of using old, slow, polling-based algorithms ICBIT builds atop of the most up to date technologies. Its web trading client is in pure HTML and JavaScript (even compatible with most mobile devices), however it's fully realtime thanks to websockets and AJAX.
• Speed of trading. Bitcoin forum is full of anger against slowness of existing exchanges. ICBIT implements special high performance trading engine and uses high-performance "no SQL" database to eliminate the problem.
• No limits. Most of the existing exchanges put rather restrictive limitations and require users to prove their identity. ICBIT finds this totally unacceptable and does not put any limits at all.
• "Specialize on what you do best". For handling fiat money ICBIT partnered with AurumXchange which provides an unmatched set of depositing/withdrawal services for US dollars and other currencies.

Exchange

Traded on the exchange are:

• BTC/USD
• DB.RCLMR bond (1 Ghash/s bonds that can be exchanged for purchase of DeepBit Reclaimer ASIC hardware)

Futures

Futures traded include:

• BUZ2 (Futures contract, expires December 15, 2012, settled in BTC)

History

First mentions of ICBIT appeared in June and July 2011 in the Bitcoin Stock Exchange Security Standards thread at bitcointalk.org and Bitcoin futures market discussion . By that time a very first version of the trading engine was developed.

A more detailed thread specific to ICBIT futures market was started in November, 2011. The first closed test of futures market was performed, and work on the new version of web trading client was started.

Finally in January, 2012 the currency exchange section went live

See Also

• Buying bitcoins
• Selling bitcoins

External Links

• ICBIT website.
• Trading client Direct link to the web trading client logon.