Bybit Levels Up, Adding USDT Perpetual Contracts
Bybit has had a significant overhaul of its derivatives products by adding Tether (USDT) perpetual contracts.
The move adds significant utility for traders of the popular futures exchange, who can now use USDT as the quote and settlement currency. This facilitates two-way trades, enabling traders to maintain longs and short simultaneously, even when each contract has different leverage applied.
Bybit has been going strong lately, with its trade volume gradually increasing month on month, and CEO Ben Zhou teasing at a number of new products in the works, the first being USDT perpetual contracts. Bybit now averages over $1 billion in volume a day, but like its fellow futures exchanges, saw a massive inflow of volume between March 12-14 when market volatility was at its peak, reaching $4.8B on Bybit on March 13.
Greater Leverage With No Expiry
Bybit already provides BTC, ETH, EOS, and XRP futures contracts paired with USD. The introduction of USDT perpetual contracts will emulate the underlying spot market, but with greater leverage. Like Bybit’s current perpetual contracts, USDT contracts will have no expiry date, and the price will be anchored to the underlying index to ensure price accuracy is maintained.
Tether has become the crypto industry’s benchmark for denominating USD prices, despite the array of stablecoins that have since complemented it. This is in part due to Tether’s ability to closely adhere to its dollar peg, but is also on account of the failings of other stablecoins. Gemini’s GUSD has withered away, leaving Circle’s USDC and Binance’s BUSD as the main fiat-backed competitors.
Crypto-collateralized stablecoins, meanwhile, have been enduring their own problems, with SAI failing to maintain its dollar peg due to problems with MakerDAO’s underlying collateralization infrastructure.
Options Traders Can Hedge Their Bets
One of the main benefits that Bybit’s introduction of USDT contracts will bring to traders is eliminating the need to maintain multiple balances. Up until now, getting margin called would call for topping up your account balance using the underlying asset in question. The new system enables different contract types to be deployed simultaneously, and for unrealized profit and loss to be utilized to top up margin positions.
At the same time as launching USDT perpetual contracts, Bybit has announced a few adjustments to its trading engine and order settings. This includes positioning the Take-Profit/Stop-Loss (TP/SL) setting within the order placement window, enabling traders to directly set TP/SL limits whenever they execute an order.
The bitcoin derivatives landscape has heated up significantly over the last 12 months, with Binance Futures increasing its volumes and adding new contracts and Bybit following suit.
Deribit and OKEx have also been gaining ground on BitMEX, which stuttered earlier this month, when cascading long liquidations were followed by the exchange going offline for a short period.
Completing the retail futures market is FTX, which has earned acclaim for its eclectic range of derivatives options, including the ability to wager on the US Presidential election through purchasing futures contracts for the leading candidates.
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OhNoCryptocurrency via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @Oliver Dale, @Khareem Sudlow