Phemex Crypto Exchange Review

Phemex is a digital currency exchange and crypto futures trading platform where users can trade Bitcoin with zero fees. The platform offers both Bitcoin spot and options trading and accepts deposits from credit cards. 

The exchange puts emphasis on their management team’s links to Morgan Stanley and their experience in providing institutional-grade trading tools and security. Phemex offers free deposit fees, trading insurance and free trades on their spot exchange. 

When it comes to contracts trading, Phemex contracts effectively follow a maker and taker model whereby the takers incur a 0.075% fee for each execution, for example, market orders. Makers get rebates for every execution for example on limit orders. Every 8 hours, Phemex charges a funding fee and such fee can either be negative or positive, consequently  resulting in either gains or losses. When the funding rate is negative, short holders will pay a percentage of their position to the long holders who earn interest on their positions.

Phemex offers Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, Cardano, Enjin, and XRP perpetual futures. Phemex is operating in a highly competitive marketplace of platforms offering derivatives products to crypto users. Some of the competitors include FTX, BitMEX, Deribit, OKEx, Binance, and Huobi.

Strengths 

• Creating an account and registering on the platform is fairly simple. 
• Phemex offers demo trading accounts and has a mobile app. 
• User accounts are 2FA-enabled.
• They offer a ‘get paid to learn crypto’ offering where users can earn crypto by watching videos and completing quizzes. 
• Platform supports multiple languages including Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, French, and Korean.
• Users of Phemex are able to create sub-accounts and give each account specific balances and permissions. 
• Users can buy crypto with bank transfer or credit cards. 
• Premium members are charged zero fees on spot trading. 
• Through Legend Trading, Phemex’s users can safely purchase crypto through USD bank transfers since Phemex has a partnership with Legend Trading which is apparently a fully licensed Money Services Business. 
• Phemex offers up to 8.5% APY through Fixed and Flexible Saving options. 
• Live support on the platform. Phemex claims to offer 24 x 7 live multilingual support.
• The platform offers advanced orders for trading.
• The Phemex trading platform is made up of a CrossEngine and a TradingEngine. The CrossEngine strictly matches client orders based on price and time priority while The TradingEngine manages a full set of risk checks on behalf of the client’s trading account. These include costs, fees, PNL, computing, and more, in real-time.

• Phemex has an affiliate program which allows users to invite peers and they receive 10% taker fee discounts for a month, up to 3 months in total. 
• Phemex also offers welcome and trading bonuses. 
• Phemex offers institutional accounts with dedicated support teams. They offer FIX API for institutional traders and Sub-Accounts for quantitative traders.
• Trading fees on Phemex are quite competitive and they are set at 0.025% for makers and 0.075% for takers. 
• The platform offers different order types and features such as limit orders, conditional orders, market orders, stop loss and take profit features. 
• Apparently security is paramount according to the team who claim that they use cold wallet storage with transfers requiring 2-level human scrutiny offline signatures. For additional wallet security, Phemex makes use of a Hierarchical Deterministic Cold Wallet System that is meant to assign separate cold wallet deposit addresses to each user. Via offline signature, all the deposits are then periodically gathered in the company’s multisignature cold wallet.
• The exchange has a lot of ongoing trading competitions to incentivise traders to be active. 

Weaknesses

• USD received from their Crypto Converter service can only be used for USD contract trading or for more conversions.
• Phemex exchange is not available in some countries including the United States, Singapore, Cuba, Quebec, Sudan, Iran, Syria, etc.
• Phemex processes withdrawal requests only 3 times per day. 
• Reviews of Phemex on platforms like Trustpilot are average.

Learn more about Derivatives Check out the review to Phemex’s competitors such as FTX, BitMEX, Deribit, Bit.com, etc. Also check out our list of the Top 10 Derivatives Exchanges.