Bittrex

As some of you know, Bittrex wasn't able to renew their virtual currency license and it was rejected by New York financial regulator. As a response Bittrex sent out an e-mail to their affected customers:

Bittrex will be ceasing all operations for New York residents. All trading for New York customers will be halted on April 11, 2019 at close of business (COB) with all account access disabled on June 9, 2019 at COB.

Note that I received this e-mail on Apr 11, 2019 which means I had zero days to sell any of my assets.

This section is very important and I hope that everyone from New York state has seen this:

You must withdraw your coins/tokens by June 9, 2019 at COB. After this date, the assets will become unrecoverable.

Bittrex instantly restricted the ability to buy/sell assets for accounts that are registered in New York state. Until June 9, 2019, people will still be able to send their assets to external wallets. The assets can't be converted prior to transferring them and here is where the troubles start.

Considering that Bittrex has one of the widest range of coins out there, this now means that some people (including me) are forced to setup a large amount of wallets to actually transfer their coins.

I have some smaller investments in many weird coins that most other exchanges don't accept. So now I have to do research to setup their wallets just to be able to transfer my assets out of Bittrex.

Why blame Bittrex when their licence was rejected?

Bittrex should have informed their clients long before and at least given us a grace period where we had the chance to convert some of our assets to BTC, ETH, or any other easy-to-transfer coins.

The first 3 tickets that I opened at Bittrex, they basically gave me a templated response and then closed the ticket. They even ignored most of my questions. I opened a few other tickets and after arguing in the chat with them for a while it seems like they are slowly realizing that they need to take at least some responsibility.

I have been fighting with the support for weeks now and finally they are lifting up my request to a team above the regular support. My demand is that they at least let me convert my coins to another currency so that I can easily transfer them out of Bittrex. Their team will get back to me tomorrow so I will keep everyone posted on the results. Hopefully, more people can put pressure on Bittrex so that they take responsibility.

If you live in New York state

Make sure to transfer your assets out of Bittrex asap! They will become unrecoverable! If you missed that, one, e-mail that Bittrex sent out then you better hurry up!

If you live outside of New York state

Don't hold any hard-to-transfer type of coins on Bittrex. Without any warning they could restrict your assets too and then try to ignore your requests when you ask them for help.

Update: Bittrex is showing their true face

Bittrex support got back to me and it seems like they went back on their word to elevate my questions to their upper department:

None of our chat agents will be able to assist you any further with this issue and it may result in your getting banned from our chat option.

So, instead of actually helping their customers. Bittrex is threatening by banning their users when they at the same time have my funds in their possession. Seems very scary, I suggest people to stay away from this exchange. I have managed to move out 90% of my assets but there are still some that I struggle with.

Posted using Partiko Android