Today the new worldwide bitcoin exchange itBit informed about their official coming in the market and declared the fulfillment of the second tour of funding. The firm collected 5.5 million US dollars, and in the last round finished the previous month gathered $3.25M. itBit is starting exchange business today for institutional and retail traders based outside the USA, also for some American institutional traders.
The founder of the exchanger is Rich Teo, who until recently worked as a Senior Analyst at Cedar Hill Capital Partners and as a takeover specialist Citigroup. itBit has opened offices in Singapore, Shanghai and New York, and it is planning to provide services to the complete world market of bitcoin traders. Major investors of the latest fund-raising round are: Canaan Partners and RRE Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, Ben Davenport and Jay Jordan.
Liquidity Provision
Bidding will be carried on in USD, SGD and EUR, with an interesting commission model - when creating orders trader will get a refund (rebate) of 0.1%, and striking liquidity off the list using market order pays 0.7% or less, depending on the volume of trading. This should encourage traders to exhibit more pending orders, increasing deeper liquidity with a view to avoid the low shallow books that numerous existing exchange platforms have came across at the beginning.
itBit is also putting through extra liquidity measures beyond the pricing models, and stated a cooperation with a major trading firm for certified market making. According to the agreement between itBit and that firm, the firm won't be able to obtain rebates for increasing book depth, however instead of this it will obtain some percent of fees made from trade volume. As Teo said, this fee-sharing agreement will encourage tighter buy-sell process by stimulating the market maker to increase the volume instead of spread.
Compliance
itBit has endowed a lot of resources to meet the requirements of the Singapore-based Head of Compliance, and also involved Thomson Reuters to select registrants and Jumio to provide identification and verification services. License in the US in not yet available, however is presently going through the state-by-state licensing process and is already in a partnership with an existing international cash transfer firm so the near future exchange will be available through an intermediary. itBit possibly will provide services for US customers by the end of the year.
Technology
The itBit developers would like to use a bitcoin traded as much as every foreign currency, and this actually means well-grown technical infrastructure, said Rich Teo. Stock engine is based on a NASDAQ technological basis open source software that allows to make millions of trades per second, which will gives itBit order of values for market growth and an option to update the systems. The firm is additionally using global cloud hosting and Akamai DDoS protection to meet the ForEx basic technical standards.