Bitcoin trading

Back in 2009, an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto created a decentralised digital currency known as bitcoin.

No. With IG you are simply speculating on the price movement of bitcoin ($). You never need to actually own any.

Yes. With our FX pairs you never hold bitcoin in the real sense, so you can take a short view to open on bitcoins.

Yes. You can open your position at the current price, or select your preferred entry point. We also offer a range of stops and limits, including trailing stops that lock in profits and guaranteed stops that can’t suffer slippage.

IG’s bitcoin settlement is based on a combination of real time prices provided directly by some of the world’s most liquid bitcoin exchanges.

Bitcoin markets are available from 4am on Sunday morning through to 10pm on Friday night (UK time) (Market holidays permitting).

Bitcoin cash is a new cryptocurrency. Launched in August 2017 as a result of a split in the bitcoin transaction ledger (known as the blockchain), it operates under a different set of rules to bitcoin, and with a different blockchain altogether.

Bitcoin’s skyrocketing popularity was causing difficulties for the bitcoin mining community, which struggled to keep up with the capacity of transactions. Traders were having to wait an increasingly long time for their transactions to go through, and expected to pay additional fees if they wanted things to move quicker.

Cue disagreement within the community about how exactly to solve the scalability problem. Many miners felt that existing restrictions imposed by the software needed to be revised, while others felt this would disincentivise miners and devalue the cryptocurrency. This ultimately led to a split, or ‘hard fork’, in the blockchain.

Bitcoin forks aren’t uncommon, but there is usually a consensus on which version of the blockchain to discard. On this occasion, however, neither was discarded. This resulted in two tokens: the original bitcoin, and the new bitcoin cash.

This enabled bitcoin cash miners to apply new rules to their mining software and expand the currency’s transaction capacity, among other changes. As such, despite a shared transaction history, the two currencies are now entirely incompatible with one another.

Yes, you can use the MetraTrader 4 (MT4) platform to trade bitcoin against the US dollar. With MT4, you’ll gain access to low latency execution, as well as a number of free apps, indicators and tools.