Bitcoin may be the dominant cryptocurrency in terms of its market cap, but altcoins have gained a lot of attention this year. Chainlink [LINK] has been one such altcoin, that grew exponentially over the past few months, providing investors massive gains. There have been several products introduced by exchanges to invite more user interest on their platform, and to keep up with the market demand BitMEX on Friday announced the plans to introduce four new altcoin/USDT underlying quanto futures contracts.
Quanto futures in a stock market is:
“a cross-currency, cash-settled futures contract which has an underlying denominated in one currency and is settled in another currency at a fixed exchange rate. For example, a futures contract on a Japanese stock market index which is settled in US dollars.”
The exchange will be introducing new futures markets for Chainlink [LINK], Tezos [XTZ], EOS, and Cardano [ADA]. Among the mentioned altcoins, LINK and XTZ have managed to report triple-digit returns, while the other two were already being traded in BitMEX’s futures market. LINK will be the first DeFi-linked contract available on BitMEX and together with XTX, they formed a highly liquid and quality product for its users.
These new futures will be trading against Tether [USDT] instead of Bitcoin [BTC] as 60% of overall altcoin volume came from USDT pairs on BitMEX. The exchange noted that they were “providing users with trading options to better meet their needs,” by allowing to trade against USDT.
This was a strong step forward by the stalwart crypto derivatives exchange especially when there has been a race among the top exchanges. Binance which is a relatively new player in the derivatives space has been reporting higher 24-hour trading volume for BTC futures with $6.39 billion, whereas BitMEX was witnessing $4.07 billion, at press time. Binance took over BitMEX’s dominance in the derivatives space and the latter has been launching new products in a bid to take the lead.
BitMEX has been watching from the backseat as other exchanges on-boarded new projects. The last time BitMEX added a new token on its platform was in 2018 with the Tron/BTC futures, after which it de-listed multiple altcoin futures markets including Monero [XMR]. 2020 has been the year for DeFi tokens and as BitMEX finally added one DeFi-related token, it may want to look further into the demands of the users among alts, rather than sticking to its old list.
