Poloniex: Exchange Review

One of the most popular exchanges in the cryptocurrency markets, Poloniex was set up in 2014 in Wilmington, Delaware USA. It was Tristan D'Agosta's vision and sight that gave Poloniex the early advantage and today the exchange has one of the highest volumes in altcoins. This caught the eye of the financial company Circle and it acquired Poloniex in Febraury 2018. As reported by Fortune magazine said the deal was worth $400 million, citing a person close to the deal. Circle believed that the exchange sometimes had daily volumes of more than USD 2 billion

Overview

Interface

Poloniex has an interface which is simple, sleek and convenient to use. The platform places all relevant charts and graphs on one page in a single view. All Major components that a trader needs, such as historic price, order books, market depth, trade history etc. are in an organized column for easy analysis and quick decision making.

For high-risk appetite investors, one can also lend coins to shorters and also trade on margin. These are advanced trading strategies that only experienced traders would attempt as the risk in these strategies increases.

Currency Support

Poloniex has one of the leading mixes of Altcoins for traders which is a primary reason for their strong investor base. The exchange strictly uses Cryptocurrencies for deposits and withdrawals and does not support bank and credit card transfers.

Although there is no support to fiats, once an investor deposits cryptocurrencies on Poloniex, they have an option of using the USDT (Tether), a cryptocurrency pair representing the Fiat USD (where 1 USDT is equal to 1 USD). This comes as a pretty useful tool for investors when the market is weirdly volatile.

Rest the trading pairs on offer make Poloniex a very attractive platform, with altcoin trading options in Bitcoin, Ether, Monero, and USDT.

Fees

Poloniex provides some of the lowest fees around, with the highest taker fee set at 0.25% when trading under 600 BTC. The maker fee starts at 0.15%, which is particularly low for trading exchanges.

There are no deposit fees, although withdrawal fees will vary depending on the cryptocurrency you’re withdrawing.  These withdrawal fees are charged by the cryptocurrency’s network, not Poloniex. Although the Poloniex fees range from 0.00% to 0.15% for makers and from 0.05% to 0.25% for takers. The complete Fee chart of the exchange is available at https://poloniex.com/fees/

Security

In early stages of the exchange somewhere in March 2014, Poloniex suffered a hackers attack making it lose nearly 12% of the bitcoins it held at that time. Post which the company has timely worked on the security features. The company claims “The vast majority of customer deposits are stored offline in air-gapped cold storage. We only keep enough online to facilitate active trading, which greatly minimizes risk and exposure.” Rest of the features is still unknown. For a user account, the near-essential two-factor authentication is available to users so that at least hackers can’t access your account with just a single password.

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Customer Support

One of the biggest negatives of this exchange is its customer support and could be a single most that would take away a lot of investors. Many users of the exchange have reported on Reddit their agony and have enough entries to drive away a lot of customers Many report long wait times—even up to and above 90 days.  Some users feel that their customer support is a dead

Conclusion

With so many positives such as high volumes and popularity, a single pain of customer support takes away a lot of point from Poloniex. A slight improvement in this would definitely be a real game changer for Poloniex. With the acquisition by Circle, we believe this could change and do wonders for the exchange in time to come.