Binance Futures Review, Month 9: Quarterly Futures Launched

2020-06-14

In this latest monthly review, Binance Futures VP Aaron Gong outlined the advantages our futures ecosystem has in store for you, including our latest flagship product: quarterly futures.

Dear Binancians, 

As we wrap up our 9th month of operations, we had an epochal, landmark launch: our second flagship product, quarterly futures. We reached 100,000,000 USD in volume, across more than 1,000,000 contracts, within 16 hours of trading. This is triple the starting volume of our perpetual markets. This is only the start of our expansion into delivery futures. Expect many more products to come in rapid succession. 

This entire product line, with quarterly futures as the linchpin, will be an important addition to the existing futures ecosystem at Binance, as well as our entire community. Some of the advantages include:

1. High maker rebate and lowest overall fees

As Binance perpetual futures is a taker-focused market, the quarterlies offer competitive maker rebates. For the first 30 days, all users will enjoy between 0.010% and 0.015% in maker rebates, as well as a flat 0.020% in taker fees - the cheapest fees for deliverable contracts in the industry. This should help both takers and makers enjoy the market to its fullest potential.

2. No funding fee

While some users appreciate the benefits of receiving funding rate payments on perpetual markets, it’s not so much fun for the counterparties paying them every 8 hours. Not anymore! There will be no funding fees on Quarterlies or any products in the Delivery Futures line; this should be of great use for hedging for miners or long-term positional traders.

3. BTC margined 

Our existing perpetual futures are USDT settled; despite having cross-collateral for BTC and BUSD, it has borrowing and Loan to Value (LTV) limits. Quarterlies will be BTC settled - this means unlimited ability to leverage your BTC up to 125x to place orders without any funding fee concerns. 

There are other benefits to a BTC-settled inverse contract - for instance, a short-hedge is less likely to get liquidated than in perpetual futures. To see why this is the case, imagine if you have a short position in quarterlies, but BTC price goes up; your BTC margin asset value will increase, which will add more buffer to your account to prevent liquidations although the price movement is against your position. 

Despite the aforementioned differences, the core is the same. The same NASDAQ level matching engine will assure a smooth experience in even the most volatile of periods and is used for all of the products at Binance Futures. The Quarterlies contract is already battle-tested, as day one of its launch coincided with a highly volatile market.

More BUIDL: BLVT, etc.

This month, we also launched Binance Leveraged Tokens (BLVT), which has shown consistent and increasing outperformance compared to alternative leveraged tokens. 

Average cumulative returns of BLVT (in yellow)

Here are more updates from our BUIDL list over the past month:

  • XRP and ETH options - trade options on your mobile apps

  • Historical data service - backtest your strategies before trading  

  • Theta/USDT perpetual contract - our 25th perpetual futures contract

  • New V2 API endpoint - faster and more stable 

Binance Futures never stops #BUIDLing. 

- AG, VP of Binance Futures