Bitcoin [BTC] Futures Update: Huobi Updates to 125x Standard, BitMEX Still on 100x

• Huobi Derivatives Markets adds Bi-quarterly futures and raises the trading leverage to 125x.
• With Binance, Okex, Huobi, and Deribit, all offering 125x leverage, BitMEX which was criticised for 100x margins stays put.

Huobi Futures today completed the upgrade on their futures platform to comply with the competition the markets. The crypto derivatives market (futures and options) are the leading providers of liquidity to the crypto markets.

#HuobiFutures v4.2.0 upgrade completed:

What’s New:

? Bi-quarterly futures;

? Futures high leverages, up to 125x;

? Locked margin optimization: reduce position margin & improve fund utilization. pic.twitter.com/wLj2zDVSkw

— Huobi Futures (@HuobiFutures_) June 15, 2020

Since 2018, the crypto-markets have fluctuated between bear and bull cycles. As the spot and holding curves are seeing consistent growth, the Price Action has been largely dominated by futures traders.

In July 2019, during the Tangle in Tapei between BitMEX CEO, Arthur Hayes, and American Economist, Nouriel Roubini. Roubini criticized the high leverage deeply. He noted,

 There is a nice tweet called ‘BitMEX Rekt.’ […] Every other second somebody has been liquidated by these guys and thousands of them have gone into financial ruin.

Volumes and Cascading Liquidations

Currently, BitMEX and Okex are leading the Open Interest for Bitcoin futures’ contracts.

While BitMEX continues to be in the top two positions in 2020, there have been various instances of market slippage of BitMEX leading to higher percentage spikes on BitMEX than other exchanges. Most recently, during the June 2nd crash from $9700, the price crashed around $300 lower on BitMEX than other exchanges.

Moreover, apart from futures, Options contracts is another space where BitMEX is lagging behind Deribit and Okex.

100k+ #bitcoin options expiring in June! pic.twitter.com/PiIbc5BM3C

— skew (@skewdotcom) June 15, 2020

FTX Move Contract

Furthermore, FTX Futures launched new MOVE contracts on Bitcoin which gauge the change in the price of an asset. They added the Greeks feature to the contracts yesterday, as Su Zhu, the partner at Three Arrows Capital and with Deribit Exchange tweeted,

this is pretty cool, who will be the first to offer more tools for sharp individual traders to spread-trade @FTX_Official MOVE against @DeribitExchange options?

While it comes with a risk for a lot of speculators, the futures market provides opportunities for arbitrage and efficient hedging of one’s portfolios.

Will BitMEX be able to keep up with the growth of the futures markets? Please share your views with us.