Italians do it better (?)

In the last year or so, we have worked hard behind the scene, for a big change in our company: we are moving all of our operations, including legal, finance, IT, offices, etc. to Italy.

It’s a long story, but I’ll make this short, by stating that this will led to a couple of important changes to therocktrading.

USD Removal

First of all, we will remove USD completely. We always had troubles with USD: while generally strongly requested by the market, we could not accept US Citizens or Residents and we could not accept USD by wire transfers.

This has always led to a poor USD market performance, in terms of liquidity and volume, at therock for obvious reasons.

Being a “SEPA focused” crypto exchange, we decided to cut off completely with USD support in anyway.

By the end of 2017, BTCUSD and USDXRP markets will be removed. Withdrawals of last USD balances will be available even after for a while, via OKPAY as it is now, but without usual fees to accomodate those who wants to trade until the end.

Margin Trading

Margin trading will be removed as well. That might be a surprise for some. But given the current italian regulatory environment, until it’s clear that we are allowed to have margin trading, we prefer to remove* it.

Compliance, in general, is important for us and for our customers: we always prefer to be safe than sorry.

Personally, I am a little bit relieved by this decision, not because of its regulatory issues, but because I have seen too many customers use margin trading without enough awareness of this powerful (and dangerous) tool.

Less profit for us, but I hope more time for users to understand.

Nothing else?

No, not yet :-). Other things will change, hopefully for the better.

Our ties with italian bank partners and financial institutions are in a good shape thanks to this move, and one thing that we can already announce is that they will give us access to bank APIs which will speed a lot the process of crediting FIAT deposits. But give some time to work on it, as it’s not as easy as it may look.

• margin trading will be removed on January 22nd 2018