Thread by @2xjump

Currently @binance is running a testnet for two proposed futures exchange platforms. Futures platform A was seemingly developed in-house, platform B was developed by the recently acquired JEX exchange. I didn't really like either one. Some of my thoughts in this thread. 1/13

First of all, both testnets only have one contract on offer: a perpetual BTC/USDT swap. Similar setup to @BitMEXdotcom's XBTUSD inverse perpetual swap, with one major difference: Binance's contract on both platforms is a vanilla futures contract. 2/13

Meaning contract sizes are denominated in BTC (i.e. buy/sell x BTC) instead of USD (buy/sell BTC worth x USD). This would make trading more similar to trading BTC/USDT on spot platforms, so might make it friendlier to traders unfamiliar with futures. 3/13

Usually though, the smallest transaction unit is one contract. Same goes for platform A, which means you can only trade in lots of 1 BTC! I don't see how this would be acceptable to most traders. I definitely want more granularity than trading multiples of one BTC. 4/13

Platform B allows fractions of contracts to be traded, the minimum being 0.0001 BTC. Perhaps under the hood, one contract is actually 10.000 sats. No way to tell, the interface is very spartan and no details about contract specs, funding, index price, etc are available. 5/13

Platform A allows up to 20x leverage, with lower leverage for larger positions. There are no margin settings, so it looks like it's cross margin based. The interface doesn't display current leverage, only liquidation price. I would definitely want to see my account leverage. 6/13

Platform B allows up to 100x leverage, and there is a setting to set leverage in the trading interface. Changing leverage after a position is created changes its liquidation price. So it looks like it's isolated margin, perhaps per contract type? Hard to say without docs. 7/13

I definitely prefer cross margin, which allows me to use all my available margin while keeping the liquidation price as far away as possible. Platform B's setup doesn't seem to allow that. 8/13

In terms of contract specs, platform A has copied most mechanics from @BitMEXdotcom's perpetual inverse swap: funding every 8 hours, insurance fund funded by liquidations, and auto-deleveraging in case of insufficient insurance funds. 9/13

On liquidation, a 0.5% fee is charged on the position for the insurance fund. This is theoretically better than BitMEX, where all remaining funds after liquidation goes to insurance. 10/13

Platform A determines its mark price based on 6 exchanges:
- Bitfinex
- Binance
- Huobi
- OKEx
- Bittrex
- HitBTC

Not so sure about some of these, especially a shady exchange like HitBTC. I guess 6 exchanges is a lot to manipulate at once though. 11/13

As I said, I don't really like either platform at the moment. Platform A is unusable because of its contract size granularity, but does have a nice interface and decent specifications otherwise. Platform B is not documented well and has an unwieldy leverage system. 12/13

Let's hope these platforms will see some improvements before being rolled out. I'll definitely keep an eye on both of them. 13/13

Follow-up on the granularity issue with platform A:

https://twitter.com/2xjump/status/1170260864987013120?s=20