Bitcoin Derivatives Rat Race
With the resurgence in the Bitcoin price, cryptocurrency startups have rushed to push products to market, presumably in a bid to capture renewed demand. According to CoinDesk, an up-and-coming digital asset exchange is looking to offer BTC derivatives to a U.S. audience.
In a press release published on Friday, trueDigital Holdings revealed that it had begun to acquire the proper licenses from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) via a firm called trueEX. If the American financial regulator approves, this deal will see trueDigital Holdings take trueEX’s registrations as a designated contract market and swaps execution facility.
Should the deal go through, the cryptocurrency platform will look to offer Bitcoin physically-deliverable swaps, which could be a medium of adoption for retail and institutional traders.
trueDigital joins a series of firms that have recently revealed that they too will be launching Bitcoin products. In fact, in the coming ten days, Bakkt, the de-facto crypto initiative of the New York Stock Exchange, will begin beta testing its BTC futures market. And both LedgerX and ErisX, two of Bakkt’s competitors in U.S. proper, have secured the proper licenses from the CFTC to offer similar futures markets.
Currently, many eyes are focused on Bakkt and ErisX. The former has been hyped for nearly a year now, and has been cited as some as the catalyst to return the cryptocurrency market to its previous all-time high of $20,000.
And the latter may reportedly be adopted by TD Ameritrade, the retail brokerage which insiders say is on the verge of offering Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to its millions of clients. Steven Quirk, an executive at the institution, said the following last year:
“I think the appeal for us is that [ErisX has] the biggest players in the Bitcoin space from a market making standpoint, both DRW and Virtu here, and you also have CBOE in a partnership with NEX. So you have people that are very well versed in this space and what we’re bringing to the table as a strategic investor is a pretty deep understanding of our 11+ million retail clients and what they look for when it comes to a product.”
Binance Sorties into Non-Spot Crypto Products
Outside of the U.S., there has also been a push to offer crypto derivatives and alternative investment vehicles. Just recently, Binance launched three times margin for certain Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin, Tron, and XRP trading pairs. But more importantly, the exchange, which just turned two, intends to launch futures with up to 20 times leverage in the coming weeks.
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