The new product will be available on the 11th of December 2018 and allows OKEx users to do futures contracts, perpetual swaps, spot trading with margin, and leverage at one stop.
According to the press release, Perpetual Swap is a peer-to-peer derivative product, enabling users to make speculations about digital assets movement. The mechanism of work is based on the futures contract, but with no expiry date and day-to-day settlement.
The notional value of every swap contract is USD100-equivalent BTC. Users can choose to either go long a position to profit from the increase of a digital asset’s price, or they can go short a position and profit from the decline of the price of a particular asset, with leverage of 100x maximum.
Some of the key features include no expiry on the held positions, leverage level of 1-100x, tracking the price of the spot market through a funding mechanism, and trading close to the underlying reference index.
Furthermore, OKEx users benefit from low transaction fees, fast settlement, partial liquidation system, tiered margin system which enables traders to adjust their leverage level. They can avoid unnecessary liquidation with the Mark Price mechanism.
Lennix Lai, OKEx’s Financial Market Director, stated that the launch is marking a key milestone for OKEx: "This product demonstrated our continuous commitment to building a complete financial ecosystem on blockchain and crypto. With the new offering, investors and traders can select the products which best fit their trading and hedging strategies. However, we would like to remind our users that due to its high leverage nature, implementing risk control strategies are equally crucial in trading."
The derivative market announcement comes after OKEx delisted more than 50 trading pairs with low trading volumes in October. The second thrust of delisting happened at the beginning of November, with OKEx stating that “this is the way to create a robust enough trading platform, which gives the best possible trading experience.”
Huobi also launched a derivative market, called Huobi DM, allowing traders to make contracts on losing and gaining cryptocurrencies.