Looking for FTX review?
Read on to learn from my experience of using FTX exchange.
November 2022- In an unexpected move, the FTX exchange has become illiquid, and they have halted withdrawals. Do not use FTX exchange until the situation improves.
Well, in past years, I have used and reviewed several crypto exchanges, and only a few of them get me excited with their offerings. Binance, and Bybit are some exchanges every crypto user should use. And, if you are based out of the U.S., then you should use Coinbase or CEX, two popular exchanges.
And today, we are doing a deep-dive and review of a popular crypto exchange called FTX. There is quite an exciting tale about FTX’s history and the innovation they are bringing into the crypto space. We will look into all these and more in this detailed review.
If you want to explore FTX along with reading this review, sign up with the below-mentioned special link, which will get you 5% off on trading fees forever.
I also suggest you grab their native FTT token, which helps you save extra on trading fees. I have also dedicated a section about the FTT token below, which may be appealing to investors.
Moving ahead…
FTX Exchange is developed by FTX Trading Ltd., a company incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda, the Caribbean in May 2019. Its offices are based out of Hong Kong.
Compared to other established exchanges like Binance, and Bitmex, the FTX exchange is pretty new at the moment, but I understand that it may potentially become a new Binance.
Before FTX, the founders incorporated Alameda Research in October 2017. Alameda Research is a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm and liquidity provider. It manages over USD 100 million in digital assets and trades USD 600 million to USD 1.5 billion per day across thousands of products: all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives. You can read more about Alameda Research here.
Why the founders of Alameda entered into a new venture with FTX can be explained by the following explanation from their website:
“Over the past 1.5 years, we have been one of the largest traders in the futures market. We ran into many problems with current futures exchanges that we believe are preventing the space from becoming sufficiently mature for institutions to trade-in. Hoping to improve the ecosystem, we’ve written countless white papers and given hours of feedback to these exchanges, but to no avail. Finally, we decided to take matters into our own hands and built FTX.”
Compelling story. Is in’t it?
FTX team comes from some leading Wall Street quant funds and tech companies: Jane Street, Optiver, Susquehanna, Facebook, and Google. The team has ample exposure to the traditional secondary market. Members have backgrounds in equity derivatives trading and seem to understand how derivatives are traditionally designed and what kind of derivatives are in demand.
Following are the lead members of the organization:
Before founding Alameda and then FTX, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities and designed their automated OTC trading system. He graduated from MIT with a degree in physics.
Gary was a software engineer at Google before founding Alameda and FTX. He built systems to aggregate prices across millions of flights, decreasing latency and memory usage by over 50%. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science.
The major features of the exchange are as follows:
Types of Supported Transactions
A user can trade on the spot as well as the futures market through FTX. Further, the futures contracts on FTX are settled in stablecoin i.e. futures contracts are BTC/USD and not USD/BTC. Using stablecoins as collateral vastly simplifies the user experience, and also substantially decreases margin requirements and trading costs.
FTX has Index futures as well through which a user can trade on an entire sector of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Thus, spreading his / her risk exposure. For Eg: FTX has a Shitcoin Index Perpetual Futures and an Altcoin Index Perpetual Future.
Further, a specific category of the futures contract, “Move contracts,” allows you to trade on the movement of the price of a specific cryptocurrency by risking only a small amount.
Tokenized stocks are the token form of traditional equity stocks. FTX offers many tokenized stocks such as Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Nokia, and many more.
Please note that FTX routes all these tokens through a third-party organization, CM Equity which is regulated in Germany. Further, CM-Equity provides the custody of the equities to a third-party brokerage firm. In short, these tokenized tokens are provided to you by CM Equity through FTX.
FTX’s leverage tokens free you from micromanaging your collateral or risk. These are ERC20 tokens that have leveraged exposure to crypto.
There are four types of leveraged coins:
Their BULL and BEAR leverage tokens automatically manage their exposure, rebalancing to maintain their target leverage and prevent liquidations. As they are ERC20 tokens, you can withdraw them from the platform and trade them.
These are futures contracts that are similar to conventional betting. A user can bet on a real-world event. If you win, the contract will be settled at 100%, and if you lose, the contract will be settled at 0%.
For Example, There is a Trump2024 future which will mature at USD 1 if Mr. Donald Trump becomes president in the 2024 US elections. FTX also launched futures for SuperBowl teams.
Alameda Research has an OTC platform for bulk traders of cryptocurrencies. To give their OTC counterparties easy access to derivatives, their OTC platform has been integrated with FTX Exchange.
FTX.com provides an option to stake your cryptocurrency and earn staking rewards on the same. Currently, this is available only on 4 tokens.
With existing futures exchanges, collateral is fragmented across many separate tokens and margin wallets. This makes it difficult for traders to rebalance and prevent positions from getting liquidated. To solve these issues, FTX derivatives are stablecoin-settled and require only one universal margin wallet.
Each subaccount has one central collateral wallet and uses cross margining for the account.
With this feature, a user can convert his or her small balances into FTT Token (an inhouse token of FTX Exchange, more on this later).
For more details on features offered by FTX, click here.
Note: Users from the USA cannot trade on FTX.com, but residents of the United States can trade on FTX.US (there is a different mobile application for FTX.US)
I can’t imagine a world-class exchange without a mobile trading app. FTX offers a fully functional mobile app that works on iOS and Android. In my testing, the app is blazing fast and gives a better experience than the web version of FTX.
Download Mobile app
Link to FTX social media platforms
Besides, there are fee discounts for holders of FTT. The current discounts, based on your FTT holdings:
Please note that FTT holdings cannot decrease taker fees below 0.015%.
FTT is the native token of the FTX Exchange (like BNB is the native token of Binance). For the whitepaper of FTT Token click here.
The Market Cap of FTT is USD 1.9 Billion with a total supply of 340 Million and a circulating supply of 89 Million (26% of total supply).
Use cases of FTT:
With a substantial number of features and benefits, FTX is a wholesome exchange that provides almost every traditional (spot, futures, staking, 2FA, etc.) and many new services (tokenized stocks, leveraged tokens, prediction market, etc.) to its users.
Create an FTX account (Get 5% discount on fees)
Further, with the growth potential of the exchange, there is a substantial potential upside to the exchange’s native token FTT.
Have you used FTX exchange? What’s your feedback and review of FTX exchange? Do you find them safe and secure for general investors and traders? Let me know your thoughts in the comment below.
News appeared first on: Coinsutra.com