Two Bitcoin exchanges, which both trade in other types of products including futures and options, are unveiling perpetual contracts today.
Perpetual Contracts
BitMEX is launching a perpetual pair with USD for Ripple’s XRP. Erstwhile, Z-cash is getting love on Binance with its own perpetual futures contract on Binance Futures.
Eventually, probably, all assets on these platforms will be available in such contracts.
Is it called Ripple, XRP, or dogshit? Who knows, who cares. It’s worth more than zero so it’s time to trade the USD pair on BitMEX. Boo-Yaka-sha! https://t.co/pa3T5vd5kl
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) February 4, 2020
Again, the BitMEX perpetual swap contract didn’t start accepting orders until today. But you can see the date of the tweet. It begs the question: what is the intent of that?
Thus far, the XRP price hasn’t seen much upward movement as a result of getting onto BitMEX. One might think they would. A lot of the people who support Ripple are the type of people who do regular trading too.
XRP isn’t the only asset in this equation that hasn’t started performing spectacularly well. Despite the ZEC-USDT perpetual futures contract being offered on Binance Futures, Z-Cash has yet to truly respond in force.
Z-cash was down 4% at time of writing, riding around $63 per coin. One might have expected a pump on the news, but it has yet to materialize.
Most altcoin markets are affected by the larger swings of the Bitcoin price. Bitcoin has been languishing at its level around $9300, trying to build up momentum to get higher.
The Bitcoin Effect
Much of the market, in turn, was red at time of writing. That’s just the way it works in crypto markets. If Bitcoin is down, you can expect most other things to be down. Oddballs like Tezos stayed green, somehow, but all the major coins lost value.
Arguably, the health of crypto markets can be determined by the variety of options for trading.
A wider variety means there’s more demand.
Binance didn’t get to where it is by refusing to innovate. Now offering futures contracts, the exchange is working to become the destination for trading crypto. But it has some competition in the form of BitMEX, CME Group, and others.
If you can trade futures, options, and, eventually, ETFs, all in BTC, then perhaps the thing really is here to stay. At least, that’s how people from the traditional financial world might see it.
On our side, we already believe as much.
