By
Temitope Olatunji
April 19th, 2024
Crypto derivatives platform Blade will allow users to trade its perpetual swap contracts in Bitcoin and altcoins with up to 150x leverage. Coinbase, as well as other giants, took part in this funding round.
Blade, a new cryptocurrency derivatives platform that is yet to launch has already created an uproar in the crypto industry. Blade has successfully managed to raise $4.3 million in its latest funding while seeing participation from some of the industry heavyweights like Coinbase.
Along with Coinbase, the funding round saw the participation of giants like A. Capital, Slow Ventures, SV Angel, and others. On Monday, August 12, TechCrunch reported that Blade in all set to launch in three weeks from now and will offer trades in perpetual swap contracts.
Jeff Byun and Henry Lee are the two founders of the Blade platform. Previously, they developed a delivery startup which was later acquired by a crypto-friendly payments company Square two year backs in 2017.
According to Blade’s official website, it will offer up to 150x leverage for Bitcoin and altcoin perpetual. Furthermore, all the trade contract settlements will happen in either Bitcoin or Tether’s USDT stablecoin. Perpetuals are basically nothing but derivative products just like the futures contracts but don’t have any settlement or the expiry date.
Jeff Byun, the CEO of Blade said that perpetuals are “arguably the fastest-growing segment of cryptocurrency trading”. Besides allowing trades on the future value of cryptocurrencies against the U.S. Dollar, the swap contracts will also allow betting the price of one cryptocurrency against others.
By providing simpler trading contracts, Blade plans to compete against similar offerings from other rival exchanges. As said earlier, Blade will provide 150x leverage on BTC/USD and BTC/KRW trading pairs. Having the Korean won in one of the trading pairs suggests that Blade is actively targetting the emerging crypto markets in Asia.
Blade has already clarified that it won’t be targetting the U.S. markets and U.S. investors won’t be allowed to use the platform due to strict regulatory concerns. Moreover, the Blade CEO says that most of the volumes also come from the non-U.S. markets.
“It’s kind of a bifurcated market. Either you have exchanges like Coinbase or Gemini or Bitrex that cater to the U.S. market that are highly regulated or the exchanges that cater to the non-U.S. market that are much less regulated, but that’s where most of the volume is,” said Byun.
“In the long term, we want to be the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) of crypto. Coinbase and Binance are building this foundational structure for crypto, but I think we are too and in a sense that derivatives are at their core about risk transfer, we want to be building the foundational layer for risk transfer in the crypto markets,” in such a way the CEO explained their future plans.