The new futures arm of Poloniex will offer support for Bitcoin perpetual swaps with USDT as collateral, with 100x leverage.
Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex has launched its own futures exchange. The platform, which was acquired by a group of investors that included Justin Sun last year, is seeking to capitalize on the booming futures market, which enjoyed a 314% increase for Q1 compared to last year’s four-quarters’ average.
According to a press release dated July 11, the platform’s new futures arm will offer support for Bitcoin perpetual swaps with USDT as collateral, with 100x leverage. Although this is lower than the rate offered by Binance for its BTC-USDT futures contract (125x), it brings Poloniex in line with the likes of Bybit and BitMEX.
Beta Mode Lets Traders Experiment with Dummy Money
Poloniex traders can’t get going with real money – or rather crypto – just yet. While Poloniex Futures remains in beta, each trader will get 10,000 USDT in demo currency to play around with and get used to the portal. Funds can’t be transferred into or out of futures wallets while beta testing continues. For the time being, Poloniex Futures will be available only on web and API, but a mobile app is expected to follow.
Poloniex executives are clearly hoping to lure traders away from rival platforms by offering the highest maker rebates of any comparable exchange, with a standard fee schedule of -0.026% for the maker and 0.075% for the taker. By making a trade and posting orders to the order book, raders can also be in line for fee rebates rather than having to cough up to cover trading fees.
Futures Market Is Booming
In the first quarter of 2020, futures trading volume surpassed the $2 trillion mark, meaning it is already eight times the Q1, 2019 figure. BTC contracts alone account for almost four-fifths of activity on the market, and while the spot market remains considerably larger, the futures space is gaining ground, with turnover up from 20% of the spot to 33% in Q1.
It’s been a busy few months for Poloniex, which launched an IEO platform named LaunchBase back in April. The platform, unveiled in tandem with TRON, will “collaborate closely with projects, community members and industry-wide partners to seed and promote the adoption of quality cryptocurrencies worldwide, including via the sale of tokens to eligible participants on the Poloniex platform.”
The first (and to date only) token to launch via LaunchBase was Justin Sun’s JUST (JST), with the sale concluding within five minutes. JST token-holders can participate in the governance of the crypto-collateralized lending system and access TRON’s catalogue of dApps.
It remains to be seen how Poloniex Futures will fare in what is an increasingly competitive derivatives market. According to a recent report by the analytics firm Tokeninsight, six derivatives platforms currently boast futures turnover that exceeds $100 billion, namely Huobi DM, BitMEX, Binance, Bitget, and Bybit.
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