On Saturday (29 December 2018), cryptocurrency exchange Kraken announced that it had enabled margin trading for XRP and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

San Francisco-based exchange Kraken, which was founded on 28 July 2011, was the “first Bitcoin exchange to have trading price and volume displayed on the Bloomberg Terminal” and the “first to pass a cryptographically verifiable proof-of-reserves audit”. 

This was the tweet Kraken sent out on December 29th at 00:40 UTC to announce this news:

Kraken’s blog post says that these two latest two additions expand their margin offering to eight digital assets: Bitcoin (XBT); Ether (ETH); Ether Classic (ETC); Augur (REP); Monero (XMR); Tether (USDT); Bitcoin Cash (BCH); and XRP.

For BCH and XRP, the following leverage amounts are available:

  • BCH/XBT: 2x
  • BCH/USD: 2x and 3x
  • BCH/EUR: 2x and 3x
  • XRP/XBT: 2x and 3x
  • XRP/USD: 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x
  • XRP/EUR: 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x

The borrowing limits depend on the account verification level. For example, in the case of XRP, they are as follows:

  • Tier 1: 5,000 XRP
  • Tier 2: 25,000 XRP
  • Tier 3: 250,000 XRP
  • Tier 4: 2,500,000 XRP

As for fees, the margin open fee is 0.02%, and the rollover fee is 0.02% every four hours.

Kraken also says that margin trading is available on both the legacy platform at https://www.kraken.com and the new platform at https://trade.kraken.com.

Finally, Kraken points out that XRP and BCH are not collateral currencies:

“Please note that BCH and XRP are not collateral currencies. This means you cannot open margin positions against the value of your BCH or XRP balances. For this reason, you should always maintain adequate balances of other collateral currencies to maintain your margin positions. Be extremely careful when trading collateral currencies for BCH or XRP when you have margin positions open, since this will reduce your account equity and could possibly lead to the liquidation of your margin positions.”

Currently, the collateral/margin currencies on Kraken are Bitcoin (XBT), Ether (ETH), Euro (EUR), U.S. Dollar (USD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), and Japanese Yen (JPY).

Featured Image Courtesy of Kraken