Crypto.com is expanding its presence in the cryptocurrency trading scene with plans to offer margin and derivatives trading later in the year. With such lofty goals in mind, the platform has announced a slew of protocol upgrades aimed at improving its performance.
Competition within the crypto derivatives scene continues to intensify as more participants enter the market with features aimed at incentivizing more users in the quest to gain a higher market share.
The expansion in the cryptocurrency derivatives arena is also helping to broaden the scope of digital asset adoption with more investment instruments available to traders.
Crypto.com Promises Enhanced Performance After Upgrades
In a press release shared with Blockonomi, on Thursday (June 18, 2020), Crypto.com announced the completion of several platform upgrades aimed at improving the performance of the cryptocurrency exchange. According to the press statement, the revamped CRYPTO.COM platform comes with improvements in its Order Management System (OMS), Matching Engine, and a unified REST and WebSocket API.
The latter two improvements will allow users to engage in high-frequency trading without any website downtime. The revamped Crypto.com platform also offers greater scalability and security for its customers by eliminating entry points for failure.
Crypto.com says these protocol upgrades will also enable the platform to deliver 10x better performance and operational throughput. Commenting on the improvements made so far, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, remarked:
“We launched the Crypto.com Exchange last Fall with a goal of creating a trading platform so secure, liquid and user-friendly that it becomes a natural choice for both institutional and retail customers. We have already seen tremendous traction in the first six months of Beta and will continue rapidly improving our offering to drive continued growth.”
Margin and Derivatives Trading on the Agenda
For Crypto.com, the improvements made to the platform are part of the move towards debuting in the cryptocurrency margin and derivatives trading arena. In recent months, cryptocurrency derivatives appear to have grown from a corner of the market to occupy a more significant place in the evolving digital currency trading scene.
According to TokenInsight, crypto derivatives trading for the Q1 2020 topped $2 trillion. This figure represents a 314% increase from the average quarterly figures recorded in 2019. The $2T crypto derivatives trading volume for Q1 2020 accounted for almost a quarter of the $8.8 trillion cryptocurrency trading total for the period.
Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency for margin and derivatives trading. The largest crypto by market capitalization accounted for 78% of the total turnover from the cryptocurrency derivatives market sector in Q1 2020.
Crypto.com’s venture into the market will put it in direct competition with established names like Deribit, BitMEX, and Binance. New entrants into the arena often try to attract more customers via a suite of trading incentives and other features.
For Crypto.com, the focus appears to be on building a service that offers robust security for users. The platform reportedly has an asset insurance coverage of $360M with its “Defense in Depth” approach aimed at ensuring complete privacy and protection for user funds.
Financial regulators are increasingly looking at cryptocurrency derivatives trading amid the increasing popularity of the market sector. While still largely unregulated, agencies in countries like Japan and the U.K. have made significant moves in policing the sector.
Japan has capped cryptocurrency margin trading at 2x the trader capital. In the U.K., the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is reportedly looking to ban the sale of crypto derivatives to retail investors.