Calling it early Poloniex, will go the way of Mt Gox

[xrpwizard]

Poloniex exchange is supposedly owned by Tristan D'Agosta. Who is Tristan D'Agosta you ask? Good question, nobody seems to know. There's no interviews with him at all except those on the Poloniex website. Additionally he has a placeholder Twitter, a just as useless LinkedIn and a website that looks like it was put together 10 years ago. He also charges $30 per hour for music compositions. Hardly the profile of an Gen Y entrepreneur or business owner, especially one in the technology space. 

Poloniex also has a maximum withdrawal limit per day. A legitimate purpose for this could be to allow Poloniex to transfer money to a hot wallet for the withdrawal. A less legitimate purpose could be that they are engaging in fractional reserve banking the same as Mt. Gox and the withdrawal limits are to prevent a run on their small reserves. 

Furthermore it's long been suspected that Poloniex are engaging in insider trading, dating back months as well as accusations of wash trading.

Please ensure you keep as much of your crypto as possible in cold wallets and do your own research. In my opinon it's a matter of when rather than if we see the end of Poloniex and that the implosion will occur within the next 24 months.

Edited April 21, 2017 by xrpwizard

[pucksterpete]

time to start transferring out!!!

[B42]

Damn it.  I better get my XRPs outta there before Ripple goes polobolic.  

 

 

[Guest]

Agree. Most likely Poloniex is fine. However I don't like the rumours. Do not know what happens when we get the equivalent of a bank run. Just to be sure I have transferred my funds for the time being.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Guest

[cmbartley]

Well you can at least keep an eye on their Ripple wallet: https://bithomp.com/explorer/rDCgaaSBAWYfsxUYhCk1n26Na7x8PQGmkq

Interestingly they were at 1.1B before the pump. There are many ways to interpret this, one interpretation is that more and more XRP traders are going long and moving their XRP off Polo. 

One of the issues for most Polo traders is that there aren't good off-exchange storage options for many of the tokens. Polo has done a horrendous job in the communications department. Their reddit hasn't been active in over 6 months (https://www.reddit.com/user/Poloniex). On twitter the announce site problems but but don't announce when they're fixed:

Their corporate structure is opaque and the only person that really speak publicly for the company is /u/Mike-poloniex their "Chief Experience Officer". In any event, here's some more info about them. I rarely if ever hold more than 20K XRP on there for any significant period of time. But at the end of the day, polo is responsible for recent XRP pumps, can't be a ll that bad  

 

[digitalis]

If you contact support you can request a withdrawal limit of $200K daily.  In order to qualify you must conduct a Skype video interview with their compliance officer.  I did this sometime ago, so perhaps this process has changed.

[tulo]

I think they make enough money to not think of running away.

According to today's volume they made around 330k USD in fees only for normal trading. That is 120M USD per year!

1B XRP are 30M USD. Ok there are other coins, but why doing something illegal when you can earn the same in one year legally?

Edited April 21, 2017 by tulo

[Antisorq]

I completely agree. One or two surprises are understandable, but the sudden "we got DDoS" and "Delisting everything for no reason" is too much. Crypto is inherently risky but Polo just multiples it to highest never seen before. 

[cmbartley]

8 minutes ago, Antisorq said:

I completely agree. One or two surprises are understandable, but the sudden "we got DDoS" and "Delisting everything for no reason" is too much. Crypto is inherently risky but Polo just multiples it to highest never seen before. 

Delisting everything for no reason? I've seen Polo periodically delist poorly performing cryptos from time to time. Seems like a reasonable business decision to me. Or poorly maintained cryptos.

[Kakoyla]

@cmbartley +1

With Polo I'm not as worried about their solvency, as I am with the attention they are attracting. 

Get enough people complaining and the regulators will definitely pipe up. 

[Antisorq]

1 hour ago, cmbartley said:

Delisting everything for no reason? I've seen Polo periodically delist poorly performing cryptos from time to time. Seems like a reasonable business decision to me. Or poorly maintained cryptos.

With no warnings given to the developers? Holders of the coin? No reason provided? Good business decision, horrible publicity one. 

Regardless, the point is that if I can't trust the exchange then there is no point using it. Who knows tomorrow they decide XRP is too close with the big bad banks and should not be considered a cryptocurrency and therefore removed? Since they failed to provide a reason in their 1 line tweet, they have lost trust.  

[XrayRomeoPapa]

My main complaints are the enormous pumps of the garbage coins like the ones they just removed. Each one pumped extremely hard atleast once that month. Especially after monster pumps like the 3000% Bitcoin plus that left hundreds of people complaining about having their money stolen and reporting them. Then the server and freezing issues while XRP was rising once again had hundreds of people threatening to report them. Even if most are empty threats they are stirring up a lot of trouble. I know it's not polos fault people are going into frenzies and losing their money but it's going to draw a lot of attention.

That website is literally creating billion dollar companies so I'm not sure how they have not been completely investigate yet. It's clear too me most of what people are doing in there is gambling and not actually investing. They don't care what the coin or project is about they see 50% up in a few minutes they are buying.

I like the website since it is convenient but I feel it would be the first to go.  

[Eik]

I think the allegations go a bit far without proof. But then again, if they don't know how to gain trust, they maybe/probably also don't deserve it. But that is for everyone to decide themselves.

I have seen in the past enough gateway/exchange misery to not trust them too much and do not hold significant amounts there.

Related to Poloniex I am a bit worried about their cold wallet practices. At least in XRP there seems to be none [citation needed]. Every 30 minutes, their main XRP wallet is active, receiving funds and sending out funds. And it contained over 1B XRP (!!!!!!) indeed around the recent XRP pump period. All in one wallet. One that is used every 30 minutes. If hackers somehow manage to control these XRP's, the small amount of XRP I would trust them with is the latest of my worries... (ok probably not latest, but neither my first worry)

[XrayRomeoPapa]

Poloniex being the big daddy what would happen to cryptos if it went down? I wasn't around during the other exchange incidents. I know others would pick up the slack fast but would the prices crash temporarily? 

[Mercury]

Poloniex being the big daddy what would happen to cryptos if it went down? I wasn't around during the other exchange incidents. I know others would pick up the slack fast but would the prices crash temporarily? 

Temporarily would be mild. A lot of alt coins depend on polo for a large portion of trade, in some cases most of it. The recent delisting of a few had them stumbling around, imagine the same across the board.

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