In an announcement on Friday Apr. 24, BITMEX unveiled yet another contract, strengthening its claim as the top crypto derivatives exchange. In a post on their official website, BitMEX will offer its customers the Ethereum quanto futures, which are similar to the perpetual contracts offered by the exchange.
However, there is a small difference, the BitMEX ETH/USD quanto futures will be margin traded using XBT contracts. The contracts are expected to go live on May 5th 2019 offering up to 50X leverage on the trade.
“We are launching an ETHUSD quanto futures contract with up to 50x leverage on 5 May 2020 at 04:00 UTC. The first contract (ETHUSDM20) will expire in June.”
Understanding ETH/USD quanto futures
This new product is the first-ever offered on a crypto derivative product signaling BitMEX ambitions in securing the top spot in this market. The ETH-USD quanto futures carry a ‘fixed Bitcoin multiplier’ instead of the conventional USD-based ETH price allowing traders to long or short ETH/USD. However, traders will not need to touch ETH or USD markets to trade the contracts.
The announcement reads,
“Traders post margin in XBT [BTC futures contract], and earn or lose Bitcoin as the ETH/USD rate changes.”
The new product, ticker symbol ETHUSDM20, will start live trading on 5th May 2020, offering up to 50X leverage with a starting multiplier of 100 satoshis (0.000001 BTC). The current ETH/USD quanto futures price is calculating the multiplier value by the ETH/USD price.
“This contract combines the quanto feature of our ETHUSD perpetual swap with the expiry and settlement found in traditional futures. As with every BitMEX altcoin future, it expires quarterly.”
A standard fee rate of -0.025% will be charged on the maker and 0.075 on the taker of the trade.
Users can test the product for the next two weeks or so on the released testnet version of the new ETH-USD quanto futures.
