Don't use Changelly.com. Lesson learned.
Earlier today, after studying on the current bitcoin cash jump when I noticed it might be a thing, I decided to flip a big chunk of my eth holdings over to BCH to ride this wave, which I guessed was going to be sizeable. As always, cursing myself for not having seen this earlier, but confident there was some motion left this early.
I popped over to Changelly.com -- where I've done several small quick coin swaps before -- and noticed the site was a little sluggish and there was a single sentence above the trade bar that said they were experiencing delays. My transactions have always gone through in 15 minutes or less in the past, so I figured if they were having a rough time it might be an hour or even at worst two, so it should be fine. Probably just that good ole blockchain IPO/bull slowness. If it was taking half a day or something they'd probably stop taking orders, or put a rough estimate of the slowness, or just go down.
I set up the swap, dropped the coins on my end to their wallet address and waited to see how my exchange rate turned out. I was watching small swings in the rate, 1-2 bch and figured I'd be all right. After an hour there wasn't anything. I went for a run and came back expecting to see the swap complete.
Nope. I emailed support. I really just wanted an ETA so I could be less tense about it or have some ballpark figure of how long I needed to go distract myself and ignore the pump. They responded pretty quickly assuring me, "Everything is stabilizing at the moment!"
I go out and run some errands, figuring in another hour or two I'd have my money. Nope again. It ends up being 8 hours before they deliver. In that time BCH has gone up 40%. In fact, I looked at the chart a bit later. The BCH was delivered to me at the peak price, which we're currently a bit down from.
Somehow, in this BCH run that I decided to jump in on at 1250USD and expected to cash out on at 1500USD -- and made the trade -- I lost 10k.
In the support email and elsewhere on the website, they say "We never hold the rate, but do guarantee that the amount was exchanged at the best available rate at that moment."
What exactly are they guaranteeing? How can you take eight hours to deliver my swap and then only deliver it right at the peak? How is that the best rate at the moment? It seems a bit odd to me that the trade was made at that exact moment.
At any rate, I can't really do anything but whine about it. It's not like I have any real leverage on changelly -- they delivered the package. Granted, they banged it up pretty good before dropping it off. I'm a bit pissed but at the same time, I'm the idiot who didn't use shapeshift because it's banned in Washington state. I shoulda worked around that.
We all know how things seem a little odd at many exchanges. If any given regular trader owned an exchange, I'm sure there'd be thoughts of using that flow of value briefly, just like a bank does. I suspect that Changelly indulged in a bit of that. Many of these exchanges and swap websites are short on communication and accountability and long on the benefits of a completely new tech space with no one's eyes on them.
If anyone was wondering, I don't recommend Changelly.com. Stick to Shapeshift. I hope I can break even on this bull run. Call me an early adopter of the next dip.
tl;dr Changelly took its dick out in front of me and jerked off with my implicit consent.
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