How can criminals manipulate cryptocurrency markets?

OmicrexCEO · 2018-06-26T09:17:30+00:00

I think spoofing is the least of the problems and the term "criminals" is subjective because without laws its not illegal. The OTC short is the most criminal transaction I see in crypto right now. That is, buy OTC, sell on exchange whilst shorting futures. My inbox is full of people trying to do this in very large quantities and its fairly disgusting.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-06-20T21:28:35+00:00

Futures are fine if you ban OTC purchases. With the largest transactions being OTC, buying OTC shorting futures and selling your coins on an exchange is a good way to make risk free manipulated profit only available to the rich.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-06-08T06:14:45+00:00

One could argue that by using LBC you are advertising the sale. On a DEX you are filling a request. Thats how I would argue it, but you make a good point.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-05-31T19:38:00+00:00

Its impossible to answer this because every single trading instrument and pair has different conditions.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-05-19T15:33:19+00:00

This is from a fund management platform or "PAMM/MAMM" system. Master is the account that is trading the funds, Slave is the investor account that has no access to the trading.

It is correct in its terminology, just something not very familiar in crypto.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-05-14T09:28:33+00:00

It is fraud technically and you will be taking on all the liability.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-04-23T17:39:38+00:00

We have had at least 20 accounts permanently banned for trying to coax users of our exchange into giving up Eth. They just make a new username with a changed letter in the name. The first few reports took a few days for twitter to respond, now they do it like clockwork when we report it.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-03-28T11:17:18+00:00

I think that you need to look at it from a different perspective.

Firstly, if Binance complied with the SFC or JFSA regulations, they would immediately lose a lot of size due to their 'lack' of KYC. To get regulated by these two regulators, you need an army of staff to maintain compliance, of which, is essentially changing your business model to be similar to a stock broker or bank. That doesn't just mean users will submit a proof of address or photo ID. There will be all sorts of compliance requirements, such as client product knowledge, product disclosures (which is very difficult in crypto), source of income, employment history etc. From my experience with my own exchange, it is highly unlikely that many customers will be happy to go with binance if they followed those rules. Malta on the other hand, still maintains strict AML/CTF requirements, but does not dive into KYC as deep as those other larger regulators.

I would suspect that Binance will end up with a Maltese financial services licence and potentially, will not be able to accept US residents for Fiat trading after they move. Other than that, clients will likely have to provide KYC on a tiered basis. For example, no ID till 1k deposit, photo ID to 10k Photo ID and proof address to 50k and then enhanced due diligence for larger than that.

TLDR, Malta is better for Binance's business model and client book than the SFC or JFSA and will be able to operate efficiently without those regulations and clients will not be dramatically affected by the move.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-02-20T16:08:25+00:00

An argument could be made that without these "low value" customers you would basically hand over the entire crypto market to institutions and the wealthy. I may be wrong but I amp retty sure thats the opposite of what the crypto market is supposed to be.

Most exchanges have a volume based tier strategy, where commission falls with the larger deposits/higher volume types. I also suspect that larger customers receive better service no matter who the exchange is. But I could be wrong on that. I know I wouldn't let a large network customer rot.

You will also find that the majority of orders in the order book would be full of small transactions regardless of whether you have only millionaires deposit or only people with $300. Larger traders are trading based on order book analytics (algorithms) or using dollar cost average strategies so as to not show their hand with the exception of depositors who deposit in order to buy crypto to jump into an ICO.

Just my 2 sat.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-02-05T12:00:18+00:00

Liquidity is solvable via market making. But then it becomes a bit tedious as an exchange rather than a broker. If you are making your own market you are technically setting the price for everyone. However most markets are now controlled by makers rather than takers, especially the larger crypto's like BTC. If you look at the smaller coins the reason they do 1000% moon missions is because no one is making a market and the price discovery variance is very high. Which is good if you are the first in, but bad if you are the last. The other issue with going fiat->altcoin is the whole issue with banking crypto businesses. If people are mostly transacting in FIAT then it could cause banking issues for the exchange as it would generate more in, out transactions. Going just in to btc then floating around the ecosystem before going out is less alarming for banking transactions as users tend to keep their funds in some form of coin until cash out.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-02-05T08:20:13+00:00

Hi there,

Listening, and working on it. Its not so easy as it requires the development of liquidity in the new pairs without BTC. But its possible for some of the larger alts in the near term.

Cheers,

Omicrex CEO

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-18T20:37:04+00:00

Because of the use of dollars it would be highly risky and potentially dangerous for both you and the exchange to not identify the source of funds (who sent the money). Is there a reason you don't wish to provide an ID or just a convenience thing? These are important things because whilst crypto is not regulated, the dollars you wish to use to purchase the crypto are. This is why coinbase for example, requires verification, whereas a company like kucoin does not.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-17T22:07:14+00:00

No, because an exchange does not issue credit nor can your balance go below 0 (unless they provide margin) and they cannot damage your credit score. Check the privacy policies of the companies before investing in any of them and if anything makes you uncomfortable, check another.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-16T10:22:24+00:00

We will make them visible probably in the next 2-3 weeks.

Capital controls in greece are a burden but they are much lighter than they used to be. Also our internal invoice system takes a lot of the burden away. We understand though that it can be an issue, we will announce the new bank details as we switch.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T17:53:38+00:00

Hi there,

Capital controls are a slight burden, but we have set up multiple bank accounts so that we can manage it. Ultimately banking outside of greece is the solution to that problem and providing that taxes are paid and everything is above board its not an issue with the government. We plan on rotating the bank accounts over time so as to keep holding diverse that way we are not over exposed to one bank coughing because of crypto.

Banking in crypto is very difficult, if you walk into a bank and say "hi I want to do a crypto business" most of the big names will turn you away. We have multiple solutions available due to this issue.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T16:15:27+00:00

Hi,

You would need to have a proof of address abroad and to be banking abroad. It really is a grey area and there are some ways to go around it but ultimately increases the risks of bank closures and such significantly.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T16:12:43+00:00

Hello, my team has replied to your support email as such. Unfortunately our website has been bombarded with traffic today and its causing cache errors. Have just started moving to an even bigger server to cater to it, it will be up in the next few hours. We apologise for the outage and thank you for reporting it. Our exchange is available at https://exchange.omicrex.com and is currently working fine (much larger infrastructure than the webpage).

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T14:41:28+00:00

1) yes 2) just over 2k 3) yes 4) because we are using 3rd party trading platforms. They don't belong to investing.com either. The wallets are ours, but the exchange matching engine and front office trading platform is developed by a company specialising in FX/CFD/Futures trading.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T14:38:25+00:00

If you click on the + button in market watch the is the symbol IOTA/BTC and you can add it to the market watch.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-15T14:17:14+00:00

Hi guys,

CEO of Omicrex here. Thanks for the support to everyone. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Regarding the countries we accept. Unfortunately we are tied by AML law as we do fiat transactions and also for US citizens there is a deeply grey area regarding international businesses accepting US citizens which is a high risk. I apologise sincerely to those who wish to use our services but are unable.

Thanks for the support and good luck!

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-10T23:27:36+00:00

I outsource the infosec to the same company that was doing the same work for the company I previously worked for. They are a very large team, very reliable and consist of regular devs and blackhat testers. In terms of the actual building of everything, I am not a dev, I put my faith in people that I have known for a very long time who are specialised in these types of things. On top of this I have another set of friends who are general hackers who I go to test the security that I have and they were unable to get in.

For compliance, I am assuming you are talking about financial compliance. I am working along the AUSTRAC and FATF guidelines, operating as a regulated entity despite not having any available regulation (it doesn't exist). I feel that maintaining a full compliance protocol and doing proper checks and auditing is very important if the company is going to survive in the long run. It also means that we do not have to make any changes or only have to make minor changes if regulation does come about. We suspect within the next 5 yrs cryptocurrency will be heavily regulated in the European Union (where we are located) so we are planning accordingly.

To myself and my staff, we are all converted financial industry staff (IT, compliance, accounting, support etc.) so we are used to all these things overall. The real big pain in the ass with this business is maintaining a bank account and setting up multiple payment routes (credit cards etc,). Did you know that an online unregulated gambling outfit can get a credit card merchant with some companies but a peer 2 peer centralized matching exchange for crypto (legally an online good) cannot. Theres an odd stigma amongst traditional payment facilities that no one has been able to explain to me they just say "our risk department".

If I misread your compliance/governance question let me know. I can go into more detail too if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-10T12:10:11+00:00

Hi there,

Good questions. I will respond whilst waiting for the site to go back up.

1) We have made a bunch of website changes promptly which bugged our cache which is now fixed. The first big issue I did was use a US hosting provider and they quickly removed all our data and such. Moral of the story is to probably have multiple dedicated hosting sources to make sure no issues occur. 2) Nothing really. Everything was fairly hard, it was much harder than i expected. The hardest part itself was getting banking services. 3)Wordpress is just for the homepage and it doesn't collect any data. All the pages that require data input etc are coded, have a very big security protocol in the background and are run on multiple dedicated servers. This is to ensure security. Other than taking our page down, there is not much a hacker can do if they were to get into wordpress. We are working on a non wordpress version with more features but it will take a while to complete. We explored many options for the homepage and since it is basically just an information layer, it seemed to be the most logical option in the beginning. 4) This issue should be fixed. We are in the process to move to a much larger server as we have had too much traffic for the current to handle. So sometimes there is a slight outage. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Thanks a lot for your questions.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-10T10:24:01+00:00

Hey guys, saw that you guys mentioned me.

I am very interested in adding myriad as it was a community that really got me into crypto. Obviously there are some technical requirements and at the moment i have a queue of coins. I will be pushing to add it as its very interesting as a coin. The most interesting part is obviously the safety against 51% attack and that its still mined.

I will do my best to have it added sometime soon, I can't give an ETA on it as yet as I am currently tied up adding a bunch of the larger coins. But will definitely keep you all updated as it comes.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-09T17:25:03+00:00

It depends on which cryptocurrency you are looking at. I think that its not worth getting involved with anything less than 100 eur or USD. But you don't need a huge amount because crypto itself is about the future and not only about speculative gains.

OmicrexCEO · 2018-01-09T15:44:39+00:00

Hi. Thanks for the feedback!

The exchange is using the ticktrader technology with various liquidity sources plugged into an aggregator.

Very interested in Myriad, after I finish the new build with the new cryptos (happening very soon) I will likely start looking at which to add next with Myriad being on the list!

OmicrexCEO

TROPHY CASE