There's also https://blocktrades.us/
Suggested deposit limit: 6.61478521 BTC
(this limit represents a "safe fraction" of their reserves)
Whoa, why is blocktrades able to transfer so much more than MetaExchange?
Are they a BitShares based DAC?
Do they have huge fees or something?
Sorry for the barrage of questions
Hi Ken,
BlockTrades can handle large transfers primarily because we maintain large "pools" of each asset we supply. This is mainly a matter of our capitalization level, although some of the pricing and market-making algorithms we use are also a factor.
BlockTrades isn't a BitShares-based DAC, it's just a company like Metaexchange, but we were comfortable to risk a fair amount of money to provide good liquidity for large investors. Our pools can run low, and just like metaexchange, we have to buy on external exchanges when there is too much of an imbalance in the flow of transactions (for example, if more people are buying BTS with BTC than vice versa for a sustained period of time).
As a practical matter, however, it's generally cheaper to buy a large quantity from BlockTrades than from an exchange, unless you have a lot of free time on your hands, because we're slowly buying over time, whereas if you tried to quickly buy up a large quantity on an exchange, you would end up buying most of the asset at a higher price than the "feed" price.
Metaexchange is better advertised, in large part because of their placement on bitsharesblocks, so our higher liquidity is our best counter to that. From what I can tell, we get fewer, larger orders and they get more smaller orders, so I suspect the business level is somewhat balanced between the two companies.
Rates between metaexchange and blocktrades are reasonably close I would say, although I suspect we've generally offered a slight edge in price.
We also allow direct Credit-Card to cryptocurrency conversions, which allows buyers to eliminated the fee associated with the intermediate fiat-to-bitcoin conversion. These purchases are currently processed manually, and only for larger quantity orders (i.e 2K USD or more).
best regards,
Dan
P.S. Just to dispel any rumours about "dev funds", "AGS funds" were not used to buy our initial pools. The pools were purchased with my personal BTC, some as AGS contributions that resulted in BTS in the genesis block and later via exchange purchases.