What this exchange is
Phemex has run since 2019, is registered in Samoa and was founded by people from bank derivatives desks. It is one of the smaller venues we cover: we see a hundred and fifty USDT spot pairs and a hundred and twenty-three perpetuals. For comparison, Bitget carries over three thousand spot pairs.
It has no exchange token of its own.
What it publishes
Market data, in full and without keys. The book for every spot pair arrives as one list, so Phemex prices can be compared honestly with other exchanges, and it takes part in our spot arbitrage on equal footing.
On futures there is a welcome detail: the funding interval is stated per contract. Most are eight hours, but you need not assume it — the exchange says so outright. Our funding section annualises from the real interval.
A technical quirk: prices as integers
This is rare and worth noting. Phemex serves spot prices not as decimals but as scaled integers: 160700000 at a scale of eight means 1.607. The scale differs per market and lives in a separate product directory.
The practical lesson for anyone writing a collector: without that directory Phemex numbers cannot be read, and read naively they come out hundreds of millions of times too large.
What it withholds
The withdrawal network list is there — fourteen of them for USDT. But there are no withdrawal fees in it: not a single field about cost. So Phemex is absent from our transfers section, as Kraken is: showing networks without the price of moving is pointless, and we will not invent the figures.
P2P is not available programmatically either, so it is missing from our P2P rate sections too.
Who it suits
As an additional venue in cross-exchange routes and in funding: the book is even, the data honest, the comparison sound. It is rarely chosen as a primary venue — the listing is narrow and transfer costs cannot be priced in advance.