Phemex review 2025

What is Phemex?

On top of being a cryptocurrency exchange with spot markets like Bitvavo, Phemex is also a derivatives exchange. A derivative is a financial product that imitates the same value or price as a target cryptocurrency. For example, the price of a Bitcoin derivative matches the price of a real bitcoin. Through these derivatives you can speculate on the price of Bitcoin without actually needing to buy or sell the coin itself.

These exchanges are very popular with experienced traders as they allow you to trade with leverage. Leveraged financial instruments are very risky, but offer you more potential for quicker profits. At the same time, you could also lose your money extremely fast. One of the reasons for Phemex’s launch is due to the ongoing and persistent consistency issues that afflict other competitors such as BitMEX.

Phemex’s founders come from Morgan Stanley, a well-known business bank in America. Their goal is to make the crypto scene as reliable and secure as the traditional finance scene. Their mission is to become the world’s most reliable cryptocurrency and derivatives exchange.

Phemex does not only want to facilitate crypto trading, but also wants to bridge the gap that exists with traditional finance by offering products such as stock indexes, interest rates, Forex, energy, and other commodities. All of their services and products are designed with simplifying and lowering the entry barrier for new traders in mind to ultimately build the most user-friendly platform.

With their newly launched Phemex Token (PT), Phemex will be the first semi-centralized exchange in the world.

Why should you choose Phemex?

Phemex offers a number of interesting services. The company began as a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange offering products such as Bitcoin perpetual contracts.

Phemex allows a maximum leverage of 100x on these products. This means that you can hold a position worth 100x more than your original investment. However, a very small change in price in the opposite direction can cause you to get liquidated and lose all your funds. This type of leverage is already offered by ByBit. Leveraged products are incredibly risky and must be used with careful consideration.

To help you manage this risk, Phemex offers tools such as take profit and stop loss conditional orders. With these orders you can define and improve your trading strategies while maximizing opportunities for profit.

Since May of 2020 Phemex also offer an innovative zero-fee spot trading service. With it, you can trade BTC, ETH, XRP, LINK, XTZ, LTC, ADA, TRX, ONT, BCH, and NEO against USDT on the platform without having to pay any commissions. Compare this to most popular exchanges that charge 0.10-0.50% each time you buy or sell a cryptocurrency.

The platform can also process 300,000 trades per second. This means that in times of high volatility you can feel secure knowing that your trades will definitely process. Unlike the constant outages we see happening at BitMEX all the time.

Finally, Phemex also has its own app for Android and iOS. Please continue to read our Phemex review to learn more about this platform.

How to create a Phemex account?

Creating an account is incredibly easy:

1. First go to the Phemex.com registration page.
2. Enter your email address and password.
3. Your Invitation Code is HUDHN
4. Click on Continue, then you receive a verification email and code.
5. Enter the code in the next window that appears.

That’s it. It’s a very simple registration process, and as with many derivatives exchanges it’s not mandatory to complete a KYC.

How does Phemex work?

You’ve already created an account and are now logged in. What can you do? You can start by buying Bitcoins or coins. It is possible to buy 6 different cryptocurrencies using the multiple portals that allow you to easily pay with credit card, SEPA, bank transfer, and more. Each payment processors charges their own fees. In our opinion, it is still cheaper to buy Bitcoin at a broker. If you don’t have BTC yet, you can buy Bitcoin with various easy payment methods from places such as Bitvavo. This is the cheapest exchange in Europe and only charges 0.25% in fees.

Depositing Bitcoin at Phemex

If you already own Bitcoin or you purchase it at a different exchange first, you can still transfer this to your Phemex Wallet in a few simple steps:

• Log in to Phemex, go to Assets and click on Deposit.
• Click on Continue.
• Here you see your unique Bitcoin wallet address.
• Enter this address in the withdraw page of your other exchange or wallet. Check this guide how to buy Bitcoin with easy payment methods.
• Enter how much you want to send to Phemex. Please copy the address carefully. Mistakes can cause your BTC to be lost forever.
• Click Continue and confirm the transaction in the email notification.

After 1 confirmation on the network, your BTC will be confirmed and you can begin trading on Phemex.

Next, you can then use these cryptocurrencies to make spot trades or to purchase perpetual contracts.

Perpetual contracts differ from other futures contracts in that they do not expire, whereas futures contracts have a specific expiration date. This is why you can buy or sell perpetual contracts and close them whenever you want.

At Phemex, the Bitcoin perpetual contract is normally referred to as BTC/USD. Each BTC/USD perpetual contracts is worth $1. So when you buy $1,000 worth of BTC/USD contracts, it is as if you are buying $1,000 worth of BTC.

Phemex has three ways to place orders for BTC/USD perpetual contracts: limit orders, market orders, and conditional orders. Broadly speaking, the three methods work as follows:

Limit order

When you choose to use a limit order, you set a price (also called the limit price). This means that you will only buy or sell at the specified price. If the limit price is never achieved, then the order will not be filled.

Conditional order

This is somewhat similar to limit orders. The only difference is that it has a trigger price, meaning that the order will not even active or be “triggered” until your specified price is reached. This is used by professional and advanced traders.

Market order

These types of orders are executed directly from the order book and filled at the best available market price. Choosing a market order means that you order will immediately fill at the best available price.

Phemex fees

We will handle all the charged fees in this Phemex review. The trading fees on Phemex are set at 0.01% for market makers and 0.060% for market takers. The fees for market takers are somewhat higher because the platform encourages users to fill the order books and thus create a higher liquidity. We see that quite often in the market.

Based on your trading volume or your xPT balance holding you can receive extra discounts on your trading fees. Check out all the fees here.

Another important fee to take into account is funding fees. A funding fee is applied every 8 hours. The system determines if the funding fee is positive or negative based on multiple factors. If the funding fee is positive, it means that the long positions will pay a percentage to the shorts. And if it’s negative, it means that shorts pay longs. To be clear, this is a fee that is paid between traders and not charged by Phemex at all.

There are no overnight fees.

When withdrawing BTC from the Phemex trading platform, you pay the standard minimum 0.0005 BTC network transaction. Phemex does not actually charge its own withdrawals fees.

In terms of its spot trading markets, to benefit from its zero trading fees model, Phemex offers you a premium membership instead. Plans start at $9.99 for 30 days, $19.99 for 90 days, and $69.99 for 365 days. By becoming a premium member you also get access to conditional spot orders, hourly withdrawals with no limits, and the ability to gift premium trials to friends. The standard fee is 0.10% when you don’t have the membership.

Phemex Token (PT) staking: The utility token for the exchange

The Phemex Token (PT) is an ERC-20 utility token for the Phemex exchange. The PT token can be staked to obtain vePT which helps the Phemex transition to become the first semi-decentralized exchange. With vePT the user can get governance rights within the PhemexDAO.

PT will be used on the Phemex exchange to receive fee discounts, but also to pay for all the platform fees. Staking on Phemex involves locking up PT (Phemex Token) for a predetermined period, ranging from 1 month to 2 years, to support the platform’s operations and security. In return, users earn vePT, a non-transferable and non-tradable token that serves as a certificate for earning rewards and participating in Phemex governance. 

The rewards from staking are quite attractive. Phemex uses 0.01% of its daily USDT contract trading volume to repurchase PT, which is then distributed as staking rewards to all vePT holders. The rewards are calculated every 5 minutes and can be claimed on the staking page.

How to stake your PT?

1. Register an account at Phemex.
2. Mint your Phemex Soul Pass (the pass can only be minted with a 30-day trading volume of $10.000 or higher).
3. Click on PT Staking.
4. Enter the amount of PT you want to staken and the Lock Time. 
5. Click Stake.

The longer you stake your PT, the higher the vePT rewards. The rewards are calculated every 5 minutes and can be claimed on the staking page. Users also have the option for auto-stake, which automatically claims rewards and adds them to the stake, executed daily.

Phemex bonuses

Phemex has multiple bonuses to attract new customers. Every single new user receives a Premium Trial membership for 7 days.

Phemex has a special promotion for new and existing users in 2025. Based on your deposit or other successfully performing other tasks you can win an extra bonus of up to $ 8800:

• Registration and Advanced Identity Verification: Win up to 1200 USDT.
• First-time Deposit/Coin Purchase: Win up to 1500 USDT.
• First-time Trading: Win up to 2100 USDT.
• Advanced Trading for New User: Win up to 4000 USDT

On top of that, a Phemex bonus totaling $ 100 is available by doing small tasks:

• Receive $80 for a deposit of 0.2 BTC or more.
• Receive $10 for a spot order greater than 500 USD
• Receive $10 for a BTC/USD trade of USD 5,000 or more

We will update our Phemex review when there are new bonuses or free Bitcoin deals.

Is Phemex safe?

This is perhaps the most important question of all, especially since you are trading with real money and the exchange is relatively new. You definitely want to know if they are able to keep your funds safe and if they have safeguards against hackers.

The answer is that they take their security very seriously (as they should). All assets are 100% stored on cold wallets. Each withdrawal is monitored thoroughly by the team and needs to be approved by 2 human offline signatures. Based on the advanced experience of the founders in Wall Street risk management, they are able to quickly detect any malicious actions and take rapid action to protect their users’ assets and the platform.

Another sign that Phemex is safe is that the core team consists of ex-managers and developers from Morgan Stanley. This shows confidence in the market. The previous CEO of Phemex, Jack Tao, worked for 11 years at Morgan Stanley as a VP specializing in developing algorithmic trading platforms. His experience on the field has helped Phemex develop into one of the most professional trading platforms available. The current CEO, Federico Variola, was the first employee of Phemex and took over the position of Tao. He is a PhD candidate at Fudan University.

Whether this is enough to beat the competition remains up to you. Currently, Phemex already ranks higher on CoinMarketCap than Deribit, Kraken, and Bitfinex in terms of trading volume. They are a top 10 derivatives exchange.

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