On Friday (31 August 2018), London-based cryptocurrency derivatives firm ‘Crypto Facilities’ (a competitor to BitMEX and Deribit) announced that it had launched perpetual futures contract on XBT/USD, and the world’s first perpetual ETH/USD, BCH/USD, XRP/USD, LTC/USD, and XRP/XBT futures contracts.

This is how the news was announced on Twitter:

A “perpetual futures contract” is a derivative product that is similar to a traditional “futures contract” but is different in two ways:

  • There is no expiration/settlement date.
  • Such futures contracts trade close to the underlying reference index price.

Before Friday’s announcement, Crypto Facilities only offered standard monthly/quarterly futures contracts on XBT/USD, ETH/USD, LTC/USD, BCH/USD, XRP/USD, and XRP/XBT. 

With this move, Crypto Facilities joins rivals BitMEX and Deribit, which already offered perpetual futures on XBT/USD; BitMEX launched its perpetual XBT/USD “leveraged swap product” on 13 May 2016. Although in its Twitter announcement Crypto Facilities says that it is offering the world’s perpetual ETH/USD contract, in reality, that honor belongs to BitMEX, which launched such a product on 2 August 2018. 

Please note:

  • Unlike with BitMEX, which only lets you deposit BTC, you can use BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, and BCH as collateral.
  • The XRP/XBT perpetual product is “Vanilla Perpetual Futures” whilst the other perpetual contracts are “Inverse Perpetual Futures”.
  • There is a settlement process every four hours that applies funding to anchor the spot value to the Index; the auto-roll period is every four hours at 12:00 UTC, 16:00 UTC, 20:00 UTC, 00:00 UTC, 04:00 UTC, and 08:00 UTC).

For the full set of contract specifications, please see the Crypto Facilities website.

According to Crypto Facilities, the XBT/USD perpetual futures product already has the majority of the traded volume on Bitcoin-Dollar futures:

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Crypto Facilities