BitMEX Appoints Former Bank Of China CCO As Non-Executive Board Director
The restructuring within the BTC derivatives exchange BitMEX continues with the addition of Wai Kin Chim as an Independent Non-Executive Board Director of 100x Group. Additionally, the former Chief Credit Officer (CCO) at the Bank of China and the company’s recently appointed CEO will join the board of directors as of February 1st.
Former Bank of China Exec Heads Over BitMEX
According to a recent BitMEX statement, the appointment of Chim aims to enhance the company’s initiatives on “transforming the modern digital financial system into an inclusive ecosystem that embraces virtual assets.”
Thus, they have gone for a new Independent Non-Executive Board Director with over 30 years of international banking, corporate governance, risk management, and compliance experience.
Apart from his role at the Bank of China, Chim had served in other prominent institutions such as Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered Bank.
“Wai Kin Chim is a veteran of some of the world’s leading financial institutions, and his contribution to strategic risk management cannot be understated. We are positioning the BitMEX platform to thrive in an environment in which governance, compliance, and performance will increasingly be a prerequisite for client trust and sustainable growth.” – commented 100x Group Chairman David Wong.
Additionally, Chim and Alexander Hoptner, the recently-appointed Chief Executive Officer, replacing Arthur Hayes, will join the board of directors at 100x from February 1st, 2021.
Fully Verified BTC Derivatives Platform
Chim’s appointment comes shortly after the exchange announced a significant milestone in its endeavor to be fully compliant with existing legislation.
As CryptoPotato reported in early January, BitMEX completed its User Verification Program, which had started a month earlier. Consequently, all customers have to verify their identities before trading, depositing, or withdrawing any assets on the platform.
Moreover, the exchange reported that it took just a month to reach a fully verified user base – meaning that 100% of the trading volume came from verified accounts.
These initiatives followed a massive blow the company suffered in October. At the time, the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission charged five entities and three individuals, including the former CEO Hayes, who own the platform with illegally operating a crypto derivatives exchange and anti-money laundering violations.
Binance, Bitrue, Kraken face technical issues due to increase in traffic
Crypto exchanges Binance, Bitrue and Kraken are facing technical difficulties in managing the sudden trading activity from an influx of new users on their websites.
All three exchanges have reported technical bottleneck issues with Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao or CZ admitting:
Systems, even after scaling, is seeing some bottlenecks. Some orders and account info are delayed syncing, for some users.
Roughly four hours ago CZ noted “ATH on a few different matrices.”
The team from the Bitrue exchange took to Twitter and acknowledged that users “may experience problems accessing Bitrue.” They claimed that the issue was due to a significant increase in traffic.
Notice: Due to significant increases in traffic happening right now some users may experience problems accessing Bitrue. We are aware of the issue, and we ask for your patience as we work hard to get everything running smoothly again
— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) February 1, 2021
On 29 January, Binance temporarily suspended withdrawals after facing a significant number of incoming users on its platform. The suspension occurred amid trading app Robinhood’s decision to curb users from trading GameStock stocks.
Between 29 and 30 January, even leading exchange Coinbase’s users faced issues in completing ID verification due to server delays. The exchange claimed that prolonged high trading volumes caused their customers to encounter problems in trading over Coinbase.
At the same time, Kraken exchange experienced “connectivity issues” as well. As of 1 February, 14:00 UTC, Kraken team stated that clients are having difficulty connecting to the site among other issues connected to very heavy traffic. The exchange also temporarily disabled account sign-ups “due to extremely high demand.”
Futureswap V2 wants to offer a home for DeFi whale traders
After the success of the automated market maker, or AMM, model for building decentralized spot exchanges, several projects are now racing to take this concept to the world of derivatives. One of these is Futureswap, an AMM-based futures exchange specifically designed for large trades.
Futureswap has recently launched Version 2 of its platform, which features a unique oracle design that allows to increase capital efficiency for large trades. Benji Richards, co-founder of Futureswap, explained the idea to Cointelegraph:
“When you think of AMM people think of the constant-product like Uniswap. The main difference with ours is we took the AMM and didn’t use the same formula. We designed it around the thesis that large trades should not be penalized for being large trades, which then will create a better ecosystem for what we call whale traders or massive arbitrageurs.”
AMM platforms use special formulas called “bonding curves” to determine how each trade changes an asset’s price. Uniswap’s formula is the simplest, as it attempts to keep the product of the two sides of the pools equal to a constant. Graphically, such a formula defines a hyperbola — a shape that approaches both infinity and zero on either side, without ever reaching them. While this is great for general-purpose AMMs, this curve is inefficient for large trades, as slippage rises exponentially with large order sizes.
Still, using a more efficient curve requires adding another constraint to make sure it is effective. In the case of Curve Finance, for example, the bonding curve can be made dramatically more efficient if the platform’s limited to pegged assets — various iterations of U.S. dollars or wrapped cryptocurrencies. With Futureswap, a similar constraint is provided by custom-built oracles.
Richards said that this was necessary to avoid the issues with off-the-shelf solutions. “Most on-chain oracles have a delay, so if you’re going to use that for anything with leverage, it likely will not work,” he said. An Oracle-based design has been attempted by Bancor for its impermanent loss protection system, but it appears to not have been successful due to front-running issues.
Futureswap’s oracles are unique in that they allow to capture the small price fluctuations between two Ethereum blocks, which are spaced out by 15 seconds. It’s a similar mechanism to meta-transactions that allow others to pay for someone’s gas fee, Futureswap co-founder Derek Alia explained:
“The idea is that you sign some parameters, you say, ‘I want to do this action with this information’. You sign that with your private key. That’s basically like a ball that someone passes to the Ethereum Blockchain.”
With Futureswap trades, users will essentially embed the oracle price data that they used to create that transaction, and the system guarantees that the value was valid when the transaction was created. By using the oracle price as an anchor, the platform can use much more aggressive bonding curves with lower slippage. Alia added:
“We need less capital to be more competitive with someone like Binance. Binance maybe needs $6 billion in their order book. We would need $300 million — or something like that — to have the same slippage.”
Like other AMMs, Futureswap also has passive liquidity providers who receive a fee for each trade going through the platform. Traders interact with these liquidity pools, with the ability to enter both long and short positions with up to 10x leverage. Though this may be considered low by cryptocurrency standards, this ceiling will be raised over time, Richards said.
Futureswap is still in the early stages of release, which is also reflected in its token model. Users and liquidity providers currently receive a non-transferable token that allows participating in the platform’s governance, as well as obtain utility through discounts. The team boasted of over $500 million in total volume so far, without any direct incentivization. Alia concluded:
“I think what’s really cool is that a lot of people who are a little bit more ‘degen’ will come in, ask if the token is transferable and how they can buy and sell it. They find out they can’t, and then they leave