Mt. Gox is self-hosting with Akamai and has new trading engine, but slowly operations are still a problem

This week starts with good news. Mt. Gox is now supported by Akamai, a leading cloud platform that safely “enables any experience on any device” and will soon put its new trading engine, Midas, in action. The new features were revealed in an extensive update published this Monday (5) by the exchange.

According to the company, “there are many things happening right now at Mt. Gox (…) that are important to our customers worldwide and to the Bitcoin community”. The platform adreessed three main issues in this update: “site speed and security, upcoming currency integrations and the administrative issues with depositing and withdrawing currency”.

One of the most important news is clearly this deal with Akamai, “meaning that mtgox.com is hosted on thousands of servers all around the world, connecting our customers at their local level”. The self-hosting option will increase the platform’s protection, but also the performance and speed of the website, which have already suffered great improvements. “Structurally we’ve moved from being a hosted service to being entirely self-hosted, meaning that we have much more flexibility in what we want to do and have full control of our data center. This is a major step up for Mt. Gox in our evolution”, the update adds.

The exchange also has a new trading engine with the code-name Midas. The engine is finished and will soon be deployed “after a couple of hardware updates” and some bench-testing at over 500,000 trades per second. However, Mt. Gox claims that Midas is capable of much more. “We’re really looking forward to showing you what it can do, and are pretty certain you’ll love it too”, the statement says.

Besides these features, Mt. Gox is testing new interface designs based on the feedback sent by the users. As stated by the platform, “selected customers are already able to see some of the changes, and we’ll be rolling them out over the next weeks”.

And then comes information about one issue that users have wanted to address for quite a while: the lengthy deposits and withdrawals from Mt. Gox, which “are being relieved, but still not at the rate” desired by the company.

For example it currently takes up to 10 days to process a deposit because our bank, upon receiving deposits, notifies us of the deposit but holds them for 7~10 days before transferring them to our account. This has always been the case, and we were still crediting customer accounts before receiving the funds ourselves, but some cases in which the bank subsequently rejected the deposits meant that we incurred significant losses. The risk is now too high for us to credit accounts prematurely. We are in the process of forming relationships with new partners, banks, and taking other steps – hopefully we will not only be back where we were before we encountered these issues , but much further ahead.

Finally, there’s also the question of Litecoin’s implementation in the platform. Again, Mt. Gox isn’t able to announce the integration of this other cryptocurrency, since this change “depends on a variety of factors, including completing all of the above before we launch”. It looks like we’ll just keep expecting, since the company won’t make any forecasts. The platform finishes the update by saying that Mt. Gox has a communication team focused on Bitcoin that is aiming all the efforts towards the global market. According to the company, there will be news soon.