ICBIT
ICBIT is a trading website which runs a few markets. Both the Exchange (currency exchange, stocks and bonds trading) and Futures markets are live now, however the most active is the Futures market.
This site is said[source?] to be founded by Fireball and DeepBit by combining best practices in high-performance trading and Bitcoin experience.
Counterparty risks
The ICBIT exchange acts as the central counterparty for trades in futures contracts. Unfortunately, however, it does not act as a final guarantor for the clearing process itself, with the results of the clearing process still ultimately dependent upon the exchange’s ability to effect margin calls where necessary; should that process fail due to counterparty risk from individual traders, the exchange does not guarantee to make up the difference. Thus, the exchange acts as counterparty only until it decides it won’t because it is unable to extract funds from traders on the wrong side of contracts which it holds. [1]
Margin call policy is explained on the ICBIT website.
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.
Futures
Futures traded include:
Futures contracts on USD/BTC rate
- BUQ3 (expires August 15, 2013, settled in BTC)
- BUU3 (expires September 16, 2013, settled in BTC)
- BUV3 (expires October 14, 2013, settled in BTC)
- BUZ3 (expires December 16, 2013, settled in BTC)
Futures contract on Bitcoin difficulty
Futures contract on LTC/BTC rate
- LBU3 (expires September 17, 2013, settled in BTC)
Futures contract on S&P500 index
- ESU3 (expires September 16, 2013, settled in BTC)
Settled futures:
- BUZ2 (Futures contract, expired December 15, 2012, settled in BTC)
- BUH3 (Futures contract, expired March 15, 2013, settled in BTC)
- CLG3 (Crude Oil Futures contract, expired February 14, 2013, settled and quoted in BTC)
- GDG3 (Gold Futures contract, expired February 14, 2013, settled and quoted in BTC)
Exchange
Traded on the exchange are:
- BTC/USD
- BTC/RUB (Russian Ruble)
Adding Funds
BTC
There is no fee for Bitcoin deposits to the account's BTC EWallet. Funds are added to the account's wallet after six (6) confirmations. Transactions made by DeepBit mining pool are added instantly.
USD
There are no methods to add USD funds.
RUB
QIWI vouchers can be used to add funds to an account's Russian ruble EWallet.
Widthraw Funds
BTC
There is no fee for Bitcoin withdrawals from the account's BTC EWallet.
USD
There are no USD withdrawal methods.
RUB
Funds can be withdrawn from the account's Russian ruble EWallet as QIWI vouchers.
Security
Accounts can be protected where both login and any money withdrawal operation requires the one-time password (OTP) feature known as two-step authentication. A mobile smartphone with Google Authenticator is the most commonly used OTP device.
History
First mentions of ICBIT appeared in June and July 2011 in the Bitcoin Stock Exchange Security Standards thread at bitcointalk.org[2] and Bitcoin futures market discussion [3]. By that time a very first version of the trading engine was developed.
A more detailed thread specific to ICBIT futures market was started [4] 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 [5]
See Also
External Links
- ICBIT website.
- Trading client Direct link to the web trading client logon.
- At one point in the past, somebody who goes by the identifier "Fireball" voluntarily took the took one "bad customers" debt.