FTX Review: Is it Worth it? (2022)
FTX Review
In this FTX Review, we will be looking into all of FTX's features and why this is becoming one of the most important and promising crypto exchanges in the market today.

FTX Review: Background
FTX is a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange founded in 2019 by Gary Wang, and Samuel Bankman-Fried who also manages $2.5 billion of assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in 2017. FTX was launched with the goal of donating to the world's most effective charities. FTX, its affiliates, and its employees have donated over $10m to help save lives, prevent suffering, and ensure a brighter future.
FTX is built by traders, for traders. FTX offers innovative products including industry-first derivatives, options, volatility products, and leveraged tokens. The FTX team strives to develop a platform robust enough for professional trading firms and intuitive enough for first-time users.
FTX Review: Founding Members
Sam Bankman-Fried
Before founding FTX, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system. He graduated from MIT with a degree in physics.
Gary Wang
Gary was a software engineer at Google prior to founding FTX. There, he built systems to aggregate prices across millions of flights, decreasing latency and memory usage by over 50%. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science.
FTX Review: Security Features
FTX Review: Fees
Trading fees
FTX has a tiered fee structure for all futures and spot* markets.
Note that FTX also has a referral program, a VIP program for professional traders, and a Backstop Liquidity Provider program for market makers.
FTT stakers receive maker rebates as low as -0.0030%, and it costs only 25 FTT to have 0 maker fees. See here for more information, and stake your FTT here.
*Fees for the spot market are charged in the target currency for maker orders and the quote currency for taker orders (e.g., market buy order on BTC/USD would pay fees in USD, limit buy order that executes as a maker would pay fees in BTC).
Discount for FTT holders
In addition, there are fee discounts for holders of FTT.
FTT holdings cannot decrease taker fees below 0.015%.
Please reach out to FTX's customer support once you have hit $1,000,000 USD in FTT holdings for fee tier upgrade.
Maker rebates for FTT stakers
FTT stakers receive maker rebates up to 0.0030%, and it costs only 25 FTT to have 0 maker fees.
Spot-margin borrow/lend fees:
In addition to the interest rate paid to the lenders, borrowers are charged a fee on borrows. Details on how the borrowing rate is calculated can be seen in the fees section of the spot margin explainer.
Other fees
There are no fees on futures settlement.
The leveraged tokens have creation and redemption fees of 0.10%, and daily management fees of 0.03%.
There are no deposit fees. For withdrawal fees, see here.
Note that fees for move contracts depend on the price of the underlying index, not the price of the move contract.
There are no fees on OTC trading or converting in your wallet; all costs are built into the price you are quoted.
Note, however, in the case of a user whose fiat/stablecoin deposit/withdrawal volume exceeds their trading volume, FTX reserves the right to charge a withdrawal fee of up to 0.10%. The FTX team will reach out to any users affected before applying this.
FTX Review: Trading
FTX offers various options for trading, in order to learn everything about each of those, we suggest you follow the links below.
FTX Review: FTT Token
FTX Token (FTT) is the backbone of the FTX ecosystem.
The FTX Token (FTT) is not available in the United States or other prohibited jurisdictions. If you are located in, incorporated, or otherwise established in, or a resident of the United States of America, you are not permitted to transact in FTT.
FTX lists spot FTT/USD, FTT/USDT, and FTT/BTC markets, these markets are standard two-way spot markets that can be freely traded. FTT has also been listed on Binance, BitMax, CoinEx, Huobi, WazirX, and Bitfinex.
FTT gives fee rebates to holders.
FTT Staking
Staking FTT gives you the following benefits:
- Increased referral rates: referrers that stake FTT are paid a higher fraction of their referees' fees
- Maker fee rebates: stakers get maker fee rebates (in addition to the standard FTT fee discounts)
- Free swag NFTs: stakers can spin the non-fungible swag wheel for a chance to win a free NFT, redeemable for FTX-themed swag, or resellable at the NFT marketplace.
- Bonus votes: stakers get bonus votes in FTX's polls (in addition to the standard number of votes, based on FTT held and trading volume)
- Increased airdrop rewards: stakers get increased SRM airdrops (and potentially later other airdrops and yield)
- Waived blockchain fees: stakers get a number of free ERC20 and ETH withdrawals per day
- IEO tickets: stakers get tickets for IEOs hosted in FTX
Unstaking FTT takes 14 days. FTT scheduled for unstaking will not contribute to staking rewards. You can pay a fee to unstake immediately.
Buy & Burn
FTX will be repurchasing and burning tokens equal to:
- 33% of fees generated on FTX markets
- 10% of net additions to the backstop fund ('Socialized Gains')
- 5% of fees earned from other uses of the FTX platform
FTX will buy FTT on its FTT/USD market. Bought FTT will be burned on a weekly basis in accordance with a schedule adopted by FTX. The current schedule typically starts at 10 pm HKT each Monday, with purchased tokens burned by 11:59 pm HKT Tuesday. The above fees are less promotional discounts, payment processor fees, referral fees, and third-party costs associated with such revenue.
FTX Review: FTX NFTs
FTX offers its own NFTs, below is a list of what you can do with them.
- You can bid on them or purchase them.
- You can attempt to auction off an NFT that you own. Note that there might or might not be anyone who wants to buy it from you.
- You can hold them on your FTX NFT gallery, and you will soon be able to withdraw them to your personal wallet if you want
- With some NFTs, you can redeem them for a good or service; details are in the descriptions of the NFTs.
- You can display your personal gallery of NFTs.
FTX Review: FTX Pay
FTX Pay offers a way for merchants to accept payments from users. There are two main destinations to which merchants can receive payments: an FTX account, and an external wallet.
1. Receiving payments to an FTX account
This is the default mode of payment that FTX recommends to merchants. Using this mode of payment, FTX is able to provide detailed information about the payments to the merchant, including via API. Moreover, because on a technical level the payment involves no funds entering or leaving a crypto wallet (only a transfer between two FTX accounts, which “live” on the same wallet), there are no blockchain fees to consider.
To receive payments to an FTX account, the first step is to create an app associated with that account. From the home page, click the Create/View apps button, which will take you to a page with a table containing the apps you’ve created. Below that table is a Create New button, which will take you to a form for creating an app. You’ll give your app a name, but that won’t be the name users will see as the destination of their payments; that name is internal to your FTX account, just like the names of your subaccounts. Rather, users will see your KYC-verified name as the destination of their payments until you apply to have a different custom name approved by the FTX staff.
Apps you create are forever associated with the subaccount you were in when you created them. Any payments to the app land in that subaccount’s balances. If you specify that a subaccount should only receive a particular currency, all payments will be in that currency.
If you make a mistake while creating an app, you may delete your app so long as the app has received no payments yet. Deleting an app is permanent and irreversible. You may also disable your app, which prevents it from receiving payments but maintains the option for you to re-enable it. Disabled apps will still show up in your list of apps.
Creating an app requires identity verification level 2. A 1% fee is charged on FTX Pay payments.
Setting up payments
From the app details page (reachable by clicking the “VIEW” button on an app in the apps page), there is a button in the upper-left corner labeled SET UP PAYMENTS. Clicking that button brings you to a new page (the “setup page”) from which you can customize the code for a payment button.
When you choose the size and currency of payments, it changes the code that shows up below correspondingly. When you’ve chosen parameters that you like, you can copy the code into your website’s source code, and the button should show up as expected. If you are using React, you will need to modify it slightly by changing onClick="window.open(‘...’)” to onClick={() => window.open(‘...’)}. Otherwise, integrating the button into your website will hopefully be as simple as copy-paste.
When users make payments to you, by default you’ll receive emails (either to the email associated with your FTX account or to a custom email you provide on app creation). To do a more sophisticated backend integration, you may want to get a list of recent payments via API so you can update your database accordingly. FTX provides an authenticated GET endpoint for that purpose.
Optionally, you can require payers to provide a memo. That memo won’t do anything on FTX's side — it’s purely to make it easier for you to identify who’s paying you. For instance, you can have your website give them instructions on what to enter in the memo field.
Applying for a custom name and logo
If you want a particular name to appear as the destination of payments, and for a logo to appear instead of the ordinary FTX Pay logo at the top of the payment dialog, you can apply for a custom name and logo to be approved by the FTX staff for your use. You can find the place where you enter a name and optionally upload an image at the app details page under the header “Request approval for a unique name and/or logo,” under the table of payments to the app. Custom app names and logos are subject to staff approval as an anti-phishing measure.
Linking an FTX app and an FTX US app
Both FTX and FTX US support FTX Pay. However, that doesn’t get around the fact that it’s still not the case that US-based users will be able to connect to FTX. That means that if you’re an FTX-based merchant, any US-based user who clicks the button you embed in your website will be turned away. Obviously, this is highly undesirable.
If you are planning to have both US-based and non-US-based customers, FTX has provided a workaround: you can link an app on an FTX account to an app on an FTX US account. This is at the bottom of the app details page, under the header “Link an FTX [US] app.” If you enter the ID of an FTX US app into the widget on that page, then any US-based payer who clicks a payment button for your FTX app will automatically be redirected to the FTX US app. (Separately, you’ll want to do the same thing on the FTX US side, so that the reverse will be true as well).
2. Receiving payments to an external wallet
If you are interested in DeFi applications, or simply don’t want to make an FTX account, you can set up FTX payments to an external wallet. Because there is no authenticated account from which you can ask for payment details, it will be difficult to know who is paying you by default, if you are receiving payments for services from unknown parties. Moreover, you will pay a 1% fee, plus whatever FTX predicts the blockchain fees will be (this may differ slightly from the actual blockchain fees paid, since FTX charges the fee upon payment request). FTX expects that this may cause problems if blockchain fees are high but the incoming payments are small; for this reason, the team has disabled FTX Pay using ETH/erc20 tokens altogether, to avoid the extremely negative user experience of having the fee be as large as the size of the payment.
FTX Review: Pros & Cons
FTX: Pros
- Solid background and team
- Strong security features
- Low fees
- Many available features
- No depositing or withdrawal fees
- FTT token burn
- Anonymous trading is available
FTX: Cons
- The Leveraged Tokens Are Risky.
- US residents have to use a different site with limited cryptocurrencies
- It is not insured
FTX Review: Verdict
After our FTX review, we found this to be one of the very best exchanges available in the market today.
FTX has a very solid team behind it, it has strong security features, and fees are very low.
FTX also has an incredible number of features, this can be overwhelming for beginners and inexperienced traders should also be very careful about using leveraged tokens.
The FTX token (FTT) is also a very soli token, the way it's been developed and the recurrent token burn along with all its use-cases makes it a very interesting investment in and of itself.
Unfortunately, if you are based in the US you will have to use a separate FTX platform specially designed for the US-based users, this platform doesn't have as many cryptocurrencies and lacks some features.
FTX is also not insured and, although one of the most exciting and promising platforms, it is still relatively young.
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