Responding to the Recent Media FUD

Over the last few hours, we have seen another wave of online publications in media and social networks that spread misinformation about WhiteBIT. Although this is not our first time facing FUD, we still would like to respond and clarify our position. Let’s break down the ungrounded FUD spread in this article.

Regarding Crypto Lending rates, which the FUD seems to concentrate on, 3 critical points were artfully skipped in their article:

1. User funds invested in Crypto Lending (formerly SMART-staking since 2019) are credited to margin trading on our exchange. Instead, participants of the crypto deposit program receive a reward in the form of crypto interest, which traders pay for using margin funds. At the same time, plans with assets that do not participate in margin trading are 100% secured by teams of the corresponding projects. In our margin trading terminal, funds provided to traders are credited at an average annual rate of 28.47%, which covers the exchange’s crypto deposit rate offer of ~23.26%.
2. All users always have the option to cancel the crypto deposit, and the funds will immediately return to the balance with no fees involved. The lending-funding process is fully automated, though, and the amount of Crypto Lending plans that can be active at any given moment is limited.
3. Please consider that in well-known cases when the companies faced the lack of liquidity, they had increased their APY rates. WhiteBIT, on the contrary, demonstrates another approach and has already decreased the APY on Crypto Lending twice. This helps us attract more margin trading users using cross-margin balance for futures trading on our platform. The new rate will be 17.39%–18.64% starting Aug 21st, 2023 https://blog.whitebit.com/en/new-fees-for-trading-plans-for-crypto-lending/. The reward rate on Crypto Lending is decreasing — this is undoubtedly unfortunate for users who have become accustomed to high-interest rates for 4 years. Still, it is suitable for margin traders and indicates a high level of liquidity on the exchange. Compare this to strategies by other companies suffering a lack of liquidity, where they increase the rate instead of lowering it.

We do not provide any third-party services with information on our users’ balances — neither crypto nor fiat. The high-level superfluous data scraping based on the current state of our hot wallets in different networks outlined in the FUD does not provide sufficient information.

Other items in that article are just assumptions and have nothing behind them or are outright false.

We assume that one of our competitors/independent investigators decided to push more FUD onto the market. This reflects the progress and improvements that WhiteBIT has accomplished lately.

As for the corporate structure:

The list of all legal entities that compose the corporate structure of WhiteBIT is specified in our User Agreement, which is published on the official WhiteBIT website.

Here you may find links to some of the WhiteBITs VASP registrations:

https://www.registrucentras.lt/jar/sarasai/vvko.php
https://www.registrucentras.lt/jar/sarasai/dvvpo.php
https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/entidades-profesionales/operativa-gestiones/registros/proveedores-moneda-virtual-monederos-electronicos/

Dear Media, if you have any questions, please contact us at pr@whitebit.com.