On 30 March 2018, we are making the following changes to Altcoin products:

• The 0.25% settlement fee will be removed on future products. We hope that will encourage greater liquidity by removing barriers to entry and exit.
• We will be removing the DASH, ETC, NEO, XMR, XLM, and ZEC pairs after they expire, for the time being. This is to free up trading engine capacity on our more popular contracts. After certain optimisations are made, we may re-list them.
• The ADA, BCH, ETH, LTC, and XRP contracts will be re-listed for another quarterly today:
  • BitMEX Cardano / Bitcoin 29 June 2018 futures contract (ADAM18)
  • BitMEX Bitcoin Cash / Bitcoin 29 June 2018 futures contract (BCHM18)
  • BitMEX Ether / Bitcoin 29 June 2018 futures contract (ETHM18)
  • BitMEX Litecoin / Bitcoin 29 June 2018 futures contract (LTCM18)
  • BitMEX Ripple / Bitcoin 29 June 2018 futures contract (XRPM18)

Today, BitMEX launches an easy, verifiable way to share your positions, orders, and PNL with the Trollbox community: slash commands!

Just type / at the beginning of one of the following combinations to send an official view of your activity on BitMEX:

1. /orders : Share all your open orders.
2. /orders <symbol>: Share your open orders for a symbol.
3. /position <symbol>: Share your positions for a symbol.
4. /pnl <symbol> : Share your total Profit and Loss (PNL) for a symbol.
5. /rpnl <symbol>: Share your Realised PNL for a symbol.
6. /upnl <symbol>: Share your Unrealised PNL for a symbol.
7. /help: Open a reference guide below the Trollbox.

In the above examples, symbol refers to the name of a contract, such as XBTUSD, XBTM18, and ETHH18.

Typing /orders with a symbol like XBTUSD will share all of your open XBTUSD orders in a blue box below your message:

Notice the BitMEX logo in the box? This is how you know the message was generated by the system, and was not a forgery by a user.

Slash commands are available now on all channels, and Testnet. Give it a try today and let us know what you think!

This week, BitMEX has seen a higher-than-normal rate of account takeovers due to accounts and email addresses protected only with a single, reused password across many services. This opens your account up to significant risk if any service you use is compromised, or your email is compromised. Please be very careful with your BitMEX account and follow these steps to stay safe:

• Use strong, randomized passwords in a password manager
• Do not reuse passwords between services
• Always enable Two-Factor, both on BitMEX and on your email accounts.

If you are locked out of your account, please contact Support. You may have already received an email from our administrators.

This post is part of a new periodic series of status updates on changes to the BitMEX platform, encompassing not just our backend development work, but new products, article updates, and features.

Last week was extremely busy! BitMEX’s engineering team is expanding rapidly while we face new scaling challenges daily. We know users demand better performance than we are delivering, and fixing this issue is our top priority.

• The engine team continues to work tirelessly on performance. Milestones:
  • We have successfully split orderbook processing from the main engine. This resulted in a ~14% capacity increase across the board.
  • We are staging and benchmarking another significant capacity increase. This particular update will fix the aberrant behavior experienced at about 13:00 UTC on Feb 26 (today).
  • We have expanded a suite of fine-grained metrics and dashboards probing every part of trading engine performance, allowing us to instantly measure when our updates improve capacity and how.
  • We are dramatically expanding the size of the engine team to deal with our new challenges as we continue to grow high double-digit percentages per month.
  • We continue to tweak load shedding to improve performance for the majority of our users. We have split rate limiting between frontend and API users to ease this, and started shedding more expensive functions. If you access BitMEX via API, please subscribe to our API Announcements RSS Feed (see the sidebar).
• The NEO contest has concluded. We have chosen to award two users with the first prize of $50,000, for a total prize pool of $125,000, up from $100,000. Thanks for participating.
• We’ve published a new Crypto Trader Digest and Research article (Tether).
• SegWit support is being trialed in Testnet. We have suspended immediate work for the moment while we focus on engine scaling.
• We’ve brought up a new frontend and design team that is starting to produce great work. This is part of an engineering scaling effort that began last year. This team is working on new data visualizations and design improvements to the frontend, as well as a new mobile app. Progress on this is very encouraging and we hope to have a released Alpha version with basic ticker & charting support very soon.
  • Please send us your wish list! Our intent is to release early and release often, so the first version of the BitMEX app is intended to be for price discovery only. While the feature count may be low, we expect to build a best-in-class, polished experience that delivers the data traders want to see, as soon as they open the app.
• BitMEX is hiring! If you’re a motivated developer with serious frontend, mobile, or backend chops, we want you to be part of the team building the highest-volume crypto exchange on the planet. See our Careers Page for more.

About 13:00 UTC today, the BitMEX platform sustained a record amount of traffic, both in orders and in number of realtime subscriptions. This traffic caused our proxies’ network traffic to be throttled on our cloud host, which caused data streams to back up. Those data streams eventually backed up enough that they caused a cascade of website users to request new data images, which was a volume of traffic large enough to render the site unusable.

We recovered the platform by temporarily disabling trading, reprovisioning the effected services, and restarting trading. Performance remained sluggish for a few hours afterward, but we have successfully scaled one of the two main systems responsible for the slowdown. Our readings show socket latency well below the 24hr average at the time of writing.

The second system will be migrated shortly and will mitigate this problem going forward. We are still experiencing slowdowns on the engine layer that will result in the dreaded “Overload” messages for many users despite the above scaling. We are very aware of the issue and have a team dedicated to solving this problem as quickly as possible. The solution in progress involves rearchitecting certain systems integral to BitMEX operation, so extensive planning and testing is in progress. We will update you once this work is complete.

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In other news, a number of major updates to the frontend have hit, including a new popout chat box. Some users may have stuck caches on the chart due to an upgrade. If you are seeing this, please full-screen the chart, then close the fullscreen window. If that doesn’t work, please clear your browser cache.