Binance Futures Review: Month 1
Binance Futures had a wildly successful first month. In this letter from the director of Binance Futures, @AG_Binance, read about the milestones and features from the past 31 days.
Dear Binance Futures Community,
On September 13, 2019, Binance Futures officially launched and took our first step, trading 19,253 BTC in volume in the first 24 hours.
Just 10 days later, the volume on Binance Futures had increased to 74,647 BTC, which marked an all-time-high and shows volume growth of 388% from Day 1. On October 3, daily volume on Binance Futures exceeded the volume on Binance.com’s BTC/USDT spot trading, and this has been the case ever since.
On October 8, we reached as high as 4th place in the BTC/USDT futures volume rankings according to market data from Skew, and we have stayed in that range to the present day. On October 14, we reached our highest market share at 8.63%, with 69,158 BTC in volume. More than 16,000 BTC of that volume happened in a single hour.
Today, we are humbled by the progress so far, and we will continue to improve and enhance our products with your feedback in mind.
We made a decision early on in the Binance Futures development process to focus on quality over quantity, particularly when it came to our core team. We felt that a smaller team of dedicated, super hard-working, and brilliant individuals can outperform a larger, less cohesive, and less focused team.
I have been constantly impressed by the ability of our team to execute and deliver on aggressive timelines, while also solving problems we have never been encountered before. Being a small team has offered us the agility and flexibility to respond to market conditions and requests from our community appropriately.
Several other decisions we made also contributed to our soaring start:
1. An industry-best matching engine
Our matching engine is benchmarked at 5ms latency and 100,000 orders per second; this is compared to many other matching engines that can only handle 100 or fewer orders in the same time frame. On September 24, when BTC price plummeted from 9800 USD to 7780 USD in just a few minutes, many other major platforms had overloads or complete outages, but we had no problems or delays of any kind. Clients have generally been very positive in their feedback regarding engine stability and performance.
2. Real protections from the insurance fund
We’ve had 0 auto-deleverage liquidations (ADL) events so far. Unlike other insurance funds that grow uncontrollably, and are used essentially as an additional source of income, we actually use the insurance fund for what it was intended. In the event of sizable liquidations, our insurance fund will accept risk and positions, and it had taken large losses to ensure that clients do not receive ADLs.
3. A liquid spot market
Many futures traders are also using our industry-leading spot market for hedging or conducting arbitrage trades. We have seen increased activities from these traders transferring in and out from spot to futures during volatile periods. The liquid and ease to use spot market, as well as the simple process to transfer capital between spot and futures, provides our customers with the most efficient manner to trade both markets.
4. Lowest taker fees
We have the lowest taker fees in the market by a large margin during our 50% discount period. (Still available for 2 more months!) The taker fee rate starts at 0.02%, and drops to 0.01% for higher-tier clients; this is typically less than half of what many other exchanges charge. Our taker fees can be as much as 7.5 times cheaper than some exchanges.
5. Excellent timing
We built the product properly, with the right business model and execution, and we were also helped by the rising volatility in the market stemming from that initial BTC price drop on September 24. Since then, we’ve seen continued improvement in our volumes and market share, and we expect to see further gains in the coming months.
In our first month, we’ve continued to build the features and functions you’ve been asking for, including:
Types of orders: Post Only, GTC, IOC, FOK, Take Profit Limit, Reduce Only
Visual depth in one screen
Drawing tool in TradingView
24h volume display
Mobile web trading
Funding rate history
Insurance fund history
Reduce only orders
Market depth level filters
Open orders numeric display
200,000 USDT welcome bonus program
Content creation bonus program
User guidance in multilanguage
In Q4, we will roll out several new major features that address community feedback, as well as several surprises of our own. Stay tuned!
Let’s keep #BUIDLing the future of trading together.
- AG
Want to hear more about Aaron’s BUILDer journey at Binance? Check out the latest episode of the Binance Podcast: Building Crypto Futures at Binance, where Aaron shares his story of joining Binance and developing the Binance Futures platform. Joining Binance from CME, Aaron also shares his thoughts on crypto derivatives, Bakkt, and competition in the market.