I Have Resigned From Bitfinex
I loved working with the Bitfinex team and wholly believe in their ability and that they will remain the leading BTCUSD exchange, both in terms of trading functionality and market share. I think it’s telling that after four years I will be the first employee to have resigned from Bitfinex. The entire team is dedicated beyond anything that you can imagine and work tirelessly to build the best bitcoin exchange in the world. It’s not just happenstance that Bitfinex still to this day leads the BTCUSD market and is the only exchange around that surpassed $100,000,000 in 24hr trading volume on multiple instances.
I have decided to resign because of the draining nature of dealing with the insane conspiracy theories, the vile people, and the incessant vitriol spewed at a team who have dedicated their life to bitcoin and creating the world’s best trading platform. Many of the most vocal critics of Bitfinex don’t want to see a healthy bitcoin ecosystem, they want to stir up shit and damage anyone they can to pump their referral links or just to stir up drama, i.e., troll.
As a personal anecdote, I visited Giancarlo, our CFO, in July and we had a little get together with Bitfinex employees. On a Saturday at 1:00am Giancarlo is sitting off by himself while we’re all mingling and for probably an hour he sat there and went through all of the pending withdrawals. Paolo, our CTO, he’s a terminator, I can send him questions at 3:00am and get a response within minutes, always. I’ll see him making commits at 4am and handling a support ticket at 8am the next morning. I’ve never met anyone who even comes close to working as hard as Paolo. Our CEO joins the weekly developer calls even though it often runs to 1:00am or later in Asia where he is located. I’ve never seen a team so dedicated to building out their dream in attempt to realize the broader dream of bitcoin becoming mainstream.
This is not to say we haven’t had our issues, that is without doubt. But people are always quick to point to other exchanges and how they don’t have similar issues, but what they fail to mention is that the trades on many of those exchanges could be matched by hand their volumes are so low. And those that reach 20% of our volume (which was as high as anyone got in the past two rallies, June & last November) encounter issues as well. The rally to $504 last November, Bitfinex was the only major exchange without downtime. Name another BTCUSD exchange that has reached a 24hr volume of 297,000btc, or even 100,000btc, let alone nearly 10 days of volumes in that range in a single month with some surpassing $140,000,000 in volume.
And yes, we had a big screw up; we were subject to a theft of 119,756btc, but ask yourself, what would have been a better outcome after the fact? Do you think any of the Chinese exchanges would have done anything besides say “you’re screwed” and run away? I highly doubt it. I sincerely hope that another theft of this degree never occurs and that no other exchange will ever have to deal with that, but the way in which Bitfinex did deal with it, I honestly believe was the most superior way of handling it. Bitfinex could have easily let the company go into receivership and leave it to the courts and lawyers to siphon off the remaining money. Instead, the entire team operated around the clock for weeks trying to find a solution to repay users, bringing the site back up so that users could withdraw their money, and doing everything in their power to rectify the situation. If you had your BFX and sold today you would have ~85% of your funds returned. And if you invested in Bitfinex, you may very well end up in the green. They have shown remarkable dedication and commitment to righting wrongs and will continue to do so until every BFX token has been redeemed. That is the Bitfinex team, dedicated, hard working, and passionate about bitcoin. They will continue to dominate the BTCUSD market (just yesterday Bitfinex reached 32% of market share) and will continue to be the best trading platform.
I’ll still be in the bitcoin industry, I don’t see that ever changing, and i’ll still be present on the forums and happy to help anyone with general questions about exchanges and trading in general, so feel free to reach out if you ever need anything.
