LakeBTC

LakeBTC Review

LakeBTC was established in 2013 as a Bitcoin exchange for financial professionals and high-volume traders. The company is based in Shanghai, China. Lake Investments Limited (BVI) owns the company, with Shanghai Trading IT, Inc. providing both technical and customer support.

How LakeBTC Works

With many years of experience trading treasuries, currencies, commodities, agency bonds, interest rates, volatilities, and all types of structured products and derivatives, it’s dedicated to building a bitcoin platform for liquidity, security, pricing, derivatives, and indexes.  With LakeBTC, it is easy for merchants, individuals, and institutions to trade bitcoins, manage their exposures, lock down the prices, and hedge their risks.

Also, it provides bitcoin wallet service to all the accounts. Users can choose to withdraw the bitcoins to their own wallets or just to leave them in LakeBTC. There are a number of rigorous mechanisms in place to protect the funds. These mechanisms include SSL encryptions, 2-step verification, cold storage, SMS withdrawal confirmation, and trade notification.

Additionally, LakeBTC’s Merchant Tools can help individuals and businesses across the globe to accept payments virtually for free. Unlike credit cards and traditional payment methods,  merchants no longer have to worry about chargebacks and large fees or delays. It is quite easy to use the platform and to integrate with it.

Security at LakeBTC

At LakeBTC, the withdrawals are run through a two-step manual verification process before they are being processed. There are other internal control mechanisms, and risk management strategies are not really made clear.

The same with all other exchanges, LakeBTC offers 2-layer authentication when logging in. Also, you can get SMS withdrawal confirmation, which is a great feature. The platform holds the funds in cold storage. However, no specific information is provided as to a percentage of funds held there.

LakeBTC Exchange Rate and Fees

There are no fees on deposits. Any other fees are dynamically determined by supply-demand, the market, your reputation, currency, the amount, payment method, and more.

There is a complete list of trading fees on the purchase page.

LakeBTC Special Features

Some of the features at LakeBTC are high availability and fast trade matches. Even when under a huge amount of load, these are two attributes that are critical to high liquidity and make LakeBTC stand out among the competition. Besides for these features, it also provides highly-secure market data and trading API’s for their advanced users who prefer market making, arbitrages, or algorithmic trading.

The platform provides bitcoin wallet service to all the accounts. Users can choose to withdraw the bitcoins to their own wallets or just to leave them in LakeBTC. The funds are protected by several rigorous mechanisms, including SSL encryption, 2-step verification, cold storage, trade notifications, and SMS withdrawal confirmation.

Also, LakeBTC Merchant Tools can help individuals and businesses around the world to accept payments virtually for free. Merchants don’t need to worry about hefty fees, chargebacks, or delays, unlike like credit cards or other payment methods.

Ease of Use

The platform has a great minimalistic design. There are two different interfaces for trading Bitcoin –  the standard trading interface and the “LakeTrader” interface, which allows advanced users to access various trading options easily.

While the website is slightly slower than other platforms, it is somewhat responsive. With regards to mobile support, the whole platform was developed in html5, and it is entirely user-friendly on mobile devices. Even though, there are no apps; the website works great on all mobile devices.

Buy/Sell at LakeBTC

Buying Bitcoin just requires three steps:

1. Create or access your account
2. Make a deposit
3. Buy Bitcoins and Withdraw

LakeBTC Trading

The platform does not have very high volumes. It only offers Bitcoin trading. It does not support many advanced order types, which limits the users to:

Limit order: This is used mainly for protecting inexperienced users from losing their money.

Darkpool: It is used in case of large trades for making the order invisible and to lessen the impact on the market. It carries a larger fee.

Maker only: It’s used in the case when the user just wants to pay the maker fees, which automatically cancels the orders if it is a taker.

Currently, the exchange does not support margin and short trading. However, it plans to introduce these features. No futures or derivatives are supported either.

Bottom Line

LakeBTC offers a solid exchange for traders who are looking for a simple buy/sell functionality on mobile at low trading fees. Account verification is managed both quickly and efficiently. For Ripple users, LakeBTC is one of a few that have integrated it into the network.

We’d like to see some more development resource that is allocated to product improvement and enhanced user functionality. LakeBTC has established itself as a top exchange with regards to fee and liquidity perspective. It would be great to see the trading product catch up. It’s a trustworthy exchange, that is safe and secure.

To see how LakeBTC ranks against other industry-leading crypto exchanges and trading platforms see our comparison charts. Read our expert reviews, see our ratings and compare the best online trading platforms, features, fees, and more.