Bitfinex Suspends New User Registrations

Bitfinex, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange, has been struggling to keep up lately. Users have experienced days of frustrating trading following persistent DDoS attacks from as yet unknown sources. This is despite the use of Cloudfare.

Bitfinex has put the blame on the abuse of new wallet address generation and on abuse of user signups. Bitfinex subsequently shut down new user registrations on the 13th December and subsequently implemented a new invitation code system, although as of yet have not made a public statement. Although platform performance has been back to normal since halting signups.

We decided to look at the Bitfinex user growth since 2016.

We found that sign ups have grown from 150,000 to over 1.6 million users as on 13th December 2017.

In January 2016 there were around 150,000 registered users, the growth was fairly even over the next year, with 421 new user signups on average per day.

Things started to heat up starting in early June 2017, where Bitfinex subsequently gained over 1.2 million new users, or about 6,435 users per day.

During December things went through the roof, before Bitfinex decided to close signups on the 13th December. They were getting around 61,300 new signups per day.

How many of these new signups are real users though? Many of these users may never even verify their email, especially if the system was being abused by spammers.

Considering about 33% signups will ever make a trade, we can assume that Bitfinex has around 529,000 real users that have made a trade.

What is really impressive though is the trading volume growth, which is over 12x higher than compared to June 2017. Whilst users have only grown 4x in the same time.

Trading volume of Bitfinex in June was approximately 10 billion USD, and is expected to reach at least 130 billion USD in December. This is whilst the price of Bitcoin increased about 6x.

These are truly incredible times, and we hope Bitfinex can support the tremendous user growth they have been seeing.

Are you waiting to register on Bitfinex?

Leave a comment and share this article on Facebook to be in for a chance to win a Bitfinex Invitation Code, as soon as we get our hands on some.

Alternatively, try another exchange such as Binance, BitMEX or Kucoin.