Bittrex CEO, Bill Shihara has revealed that the US based exchange would open up USD deposits, possibly dumping tether as their main pairing.
He hinted that dollar deposits might be available soon on the exchange, in a bid to keep up with the ever changing demand, saying;
“Yes, there is going to be a time, I actually think it’s not that far away, when we are going to open up for global signups again, we will end up doing additional requirements, minimum deposit sizes, and things like that to trade, ensuring signs up that are coming in, are people who understand what they are doing…demand has been pretty incredible.”
The exchange currently only deals with cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin and tether serve as the main pairing for their listed cryptos; however, this could all be about to change. Shihara also discussed how businesses that are focused on retail investors have used Bittrex’s back-end to offer crypto to a much wider audience saying;
“One of the ways, we get the best of both worlds, we have these partnerships, such as Korean exchange Upbit, they use our liquidity, but is basically a retail shop in Korea. We’ve built this back-end infrastructure and Upbit can just plug into it and build on top of it…We’re going to see more deals like that in the coming year. And we will be doing USD tranding; this won’t be open to everybody, available for the majority of our customers as well as foreign partners that build on top of us.”
The reason behind this change comes at a time when suspicions of Tether have heightened. They have allegedly been artificially inflating the price of the cryptocurrency, with no reserves to back up the currency, which means it could take down those exchanges that rely on USDT. When asked if we should be concerned about the Tether allegations, Shihara said;
“Tough question, we treat it as another altcoin. The market agrees Tether is backed by something, as it is trading as a dollar substitute. But I always tell people to do their own research and be cautious in crypto.”
When speaking about how the decentralised exchanges will affect Bittrex, he said;
“I think the technology has a long way to mature, we’ve got a long way to go before we see mature decentralised exchange solutions, especially trading the volume that we do on Bittrex.”
Source: https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2018/02/bittrex-start-accepting-usd-deposits/