Binance Futures Review: Month 2

2019-11-13

On its second month of operations, Binance reached billions of dollars in trading volume, powered by a platform that performed well and remained stable amid volume spikes. Binance Futures Director Aaron Gong shares the latest about the exchange.

Dear Binance Futures Community,  

October 24 was a momentous day for our Binance Futures exchange and the entire crypto community. President Xi Jinping made his first major comments on blockchain and announced the country should implement the technology across the economy. 

The results were immediate and staggering. In the next 24-hour period, Binance Futures achieved our all-time high volume, with 315,000 BTC being traded, worth nearly 3 billion USD in notional value. This abnormal volatility also caused significant system instabilities among many other crypto exchanges: overloads, lags, clawbacks, ADLs, even complete outages. Some exchanges suffered extreme price spikes and were forced to compensate their users. 

During this whole period, the Binance Futures matching engine was completely unaffected by the increased volume. We had zero ADLs, zero downtimes, and zero needles (exchange spikes). This proved to both retail users and large institutional traders that we are the ‘go-to’ market for Futures. Our technology is second to none, and our user protection is best in the industry. Our market share as grown consistently since then, and we hope to take the #1 spot by year’s end.

In our second month of operations, we went from the low hundreds of millions of USD in 24-hour volume to not 1 billion USD, not 2 billion USD, but nearly 3 billion USD. This shows the blitzscaling growth of a 2-month old exchange. We have solidified our spot as the current #3 Bitcoin futures exchange in the world, even reaching an all-time high of #2, according to Skew. Also, our total market share has also stabilized at roughly twice what it was last month. With another 2x growth, and we’ll be the largest player in the entire market. 

I want to dedicate the rest of this letter to explain how we grew so rapidly.

We focus on both retail and institutional clients, and each segment has different needs that we intend to fully cater to. Both are important for a healthy exchange ecosystem, and in fact, some of the enhancements we did for one segment ended up being beneficial for everyone. In the last month, we’ve made large strides on both fronts. 

For our retail clients, we put importance on user experience. We want their trading experience to be as quick and smooth as possible, while also providing more opportunities for growth, through features and promos. After gathering and consolidating feedback from our community and the general public, we built these features and services during the past month 

We #BUIDL: 

- 125x leverage - the highest leverage in the market

- Adjustable leverage slider - giving our users total flexibility for their orders

- Binance Android app - trade Bitcoin futures anywhere you go, with Futures now on the Binance app. (Coming soon: Binance Futures on iOS.)

- 4x new order types - Percentage order, Stop/take profit market order, Stop order triggered by mark price, and Reduced only in stop order.

- Binance Futures Complete Guide - available in 7 languages:  English, Indonesian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish

We offer:

- $250,000 welcome bonus (concluded in less than 24h)

- Lowest fees with 50% additional discounts (still valid for one more month)

- Trading competitions 

Meanwhile, institutional clients are mostly algorithmic API traders who value high-quality platform performance. In addition to the powerful matching engine we talked about earlier, we also provide low latency solutions, high API limits, and fee discounts. 

We #BUIDL

- Low latency service - for high performance

- Sub-accounts - for easier access by corporate entities with multiple traders

- New WebSocket streams for book tickers, partial order book - even more features to maximize

- Faster API data with 100ms updates - don’t miss out on any market movement

We offer:

- VIP invitation program for lowest fees - the best rates for our most frequent traders

- Market making program - make the most out of your futures trading

We constantly strive to satisfy our retail and institutional clients, because we believe that it’s the key to our long-term success. 

On average, we rolled out 2-3 new features per week and new services or campaigns every two weeks. Our team is working day and night on new features and products to #BUIDL. 

We will be rolling out multiple pairs next and will follow that up with cross-collateral this year. We expect these features to further improve clients’ trading experience on our platform as we push forward. We are furiously blitzscaling every aspect of Binance Futures and will close out Q4 2019 with a bang. Stay tuned!  

- AG

Binance Futures

(See the previous month’s update here.)