The other day I got an email saying Mandala is migrating to a new platform and I should handle business with regard to that. Of course... it was an email so it can't be trusted. I immediately headed over to the official site to check it out.
Yep, this is extremely legit.
Seeing this made me cringe a bit because I use Mandala all the time to access Binance liquidity pools without doing KYC of any kind. It's been an extremely convenient solution with pseudo privacy that I appreciate. Of course I clicked on the dashboard on my Mandala account for the very first time and their system says I've been logging in from Roseburg (presumabely Oregon).
Roseburg, Grant County, Indiana.
Roseburg, Union County, Indiana.
Roseburg, Kentucky.
Roseburg, Michigan.
Roseburg, Oregon.
Roseburg, Pennsylvania.
Hm nope just kidding there's one in PA that makes more sense.
The point being this is simply further evidence that proves that corporations don't care at all about the law: only if they can get in trouble. Binance was pulling these exact same shenanigans before they went full KYC to get the regulators off their backs. As long as I use a VPN to at least somewhat mask my country of origin this is good enough for Mandala, even though they know damn well I'm an American customer... to the point of even identifying me as such on the dashboard login page.
So why is Mandala Migrating?
Honestly I have no idea I'm just hoping they don't go full KYC like Binance did. It's very hard to tell what the actual endgame of a corporation is when you only have an email written by a marketing team designed to omit data and exaggerate what users want to hear to make the biggest impact. Looking at the email they sent me isn't exactly very useful.
Uh Okay...
You know what this email doesn't mention? Why they would ever need to completely abandon their security system and force users to log in to a new backend with different usernames and passwords. Ya gotta love corporations: they all do it. Completely change the way how things work and then act like it's a convenience to the user. Amazing work guys. Look forward to hearing what other bullshit you have in store for me. I don't want to hear about frontend changes in response to major backend "upgrades".
In any case: 30 days notice.
It looks like there will be a way to transfer funds from the old exchange to the new exchange "within the coming days", but I took action immediately and just drained my account. I needed to pay bills anyway and used the money to finally capitulate and completely pay off the credit card I was using to go long until the summer. Well summer is coming to a close and I'm over it. Looks like we'll have to wait for the end of the year to get a real rally going. That's when all the timelines are adding up (lower inflation, halving event, Blackrock, liquidity entering risk-on markets, etc). I currently have 44 cents stuck on the platform that is lower than the minimum withdrawal amount. Meh they can have it I can't be bothered with depositing $5 so I can get my 44 cents back. Maybe I'll transfer it to the new platform... or not in the event of KYC.
Hive needs to get its shit together.
You know I probably wouldn't even use centralized exchanges if Hive had a deep liquidity pool to Bitcoin with low fees (as in 0.1%). Of course I've heard tales of the SPK network and DLUX trying to tackle this exact problem. We've also got @brianoflondon giving access to the Lightning Network which is pretty cool (but centralized and high fees and low liquidity). It is what it is. Decentralization is not easy.
Things are gonna start looking pretty bleak around here if we lose any more liquidity pools. Bittrex was a bust. Huobi was pretty good but now it's basically owned by Justin Sun and should only be used as a last resort. Blocktrades is gone. Binance went KYC, and now this. The time to get serious about creating a deep liquidity pool to BTC that can't be fucked with is a pretty high priority right now, but I have faith we'll figure something out.
Conclusion
I'm not sure how many of you guys are using Mandala, but I've found it to be an extremely convenient solution as we wait for better more decentralized options to roll around. Keep an eye out for what their actual game is, because thus far that mystery is extremely unclear.