Splendours and shitnesses of Hotbit
I've been using Hotbit exchange for quite some time already, maybe for more than a year. Today I've got a bit sick of it and decided to make a small caveat for wannabe Hotbit traders.
Hotbit is a pretty old relatively small shitcoin-oriented crypto-exchange of unclear origin. That's what the guys say about themselves:
Founded in January 2018 and registered in both Hong Kong and Estonia, with its core team members from China, USA and Taiwan, Hotbit is currently based in Shanghai and Taipei.
Nothing that special, I'd say. I think it serves the Russians and the Chinese primarily. I've also heard that the US and EU folks have issues using Hotbit because of its "Chinese" origin. I'm not from the US or EU though, so I haven't had any restrictions or limitations so far. I haven't done any KYC there either.
I use Hotbit for so long because of its two nice features: fresh shitcoins and numerous "investment products".
Hotbit is "shitcoin-oriented" in the sense that pretty much every other freshly baked shitcoin gets listed at Hotbit pretty soon. I don't know their listing policy, but it looks like they eagerly accept everybody who just bothers to apply for. Today a shitcoin hits Uniswap -- and in a day or two it's already listed at Hotbit, where you can buy it without Uniswap's insane fees. Very, very handy.
Hotbit's other nice feature is their "investment products". Savings rates are pretty high for "blue chips" and can be insane for shitcoins. I remember a year or so ago I was staking Vollar and PCX under triple-digit APYs. A nice and handy feature if you don't want to mess with DeFi, masternodes, etc, and don't mind staking your shit on a centralized exchange.
These features may look just too good to be true, and actually, there're enough flies in the ointment too.
1st, the fees are high. It includes not only trading fees, but mainly withdrawal fees. The guys clearly don't want anyone to withdraw his shit from their exchange.
2nd, wide spreads and low liquidity in many trading pairs.
3rd, as far as I could see the exchange actually has only two types of trading orders: "hidden" and "visible" (limit) orders. No markets, no stops, no FOK, no OCO, nothing more. "visible" order is an ordinary limit order. A "hidden" order is the same ordinary limit order, which is not shown in the order book. In other words, when you create a "hidden" order, it actually goes into the order book, but the other traders can't see it. Sometimes a pair's orderbook shows several buy and sell orders at clearly ridiculous prices and the spread between them is supposed to be stuffed with "hidden" orders. I don't know why the guys made it so, but this system makes Hotbit clearly unusable for trading.
Shortly, Hotbit is good for swapping shit you can hardly find elsewhere for relatively modest fees.
Personally I've been shitted by Hotbit twice so far.
Some time ago I lost my weekly APML withdrawal from Publish0x because Hotbit suddenly delisted AMPL and my withdrawal went nowhere. I don't know why they did it, AMPL was not worse than most of the shit they have listed.
Recently I send 10 BUSD from Binance to Hotbit. My BUSD successfully left Binance, but never arrived at Hotbit, because Hotbit's BUSD is ERC20 BUSD and my BUSD was BSC BUSD... Hotbit guys list any new shit at the speed of light, but failed to implement BSC BUSD (or at least to put a note that their BUSD is ERC20). Well, the guys promised to send my 10 BSC BUSD back under the One Free Retrieval of Wrongly Sent Shit Per User program, "within three to six months period" because it requires a lot of hard work blah-blah-blah. Better late than never, though.
"You should have double-checked everything before sending your pennies!", you might say. Yeah, I know, I should. It's crypto, after all...
Anyway, everyone who's going to use Hotbit -- beware of... well, just beware!
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