2018 Market Summary: Bitcoin Finally Gets into Mainstream, Futures Trading Rises

Bitcoin (BTC) and its unprecedented price rally resulting in an all-time high value of around $20,000 in January 2018, undoubtedly caught the public’s attention. Despite losing around 80 percent of its price afterward, 2018 was the year which saw the blockchain industry boom in a lot of different verticals.

2018 – A Year of Diversity

Despite the prolonged bear market of 2018 which saw around $700 billion of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization wiped off, the blockchain industry seems to be blooming. CoinMarketCap currently has upwards of 2,000 different cryptocurrencies listed.

It goes without saying that the market has had its ups and downs but it seems as if it is safe to say that Bitcoin has managed to get into the sight of the mainstream and to become a true household name.

However, the infrastructure for further and widespread adoption is still in the making. While there are currently numerous exchanges which allow spot market trading where people can simply buy and sell coins, there are just a few exchanges like BitMEX for crypto derivatives where traders can speculate on coin prices with leverage.

Existing Issues

Cryptocurrency exchanges play a major role in the overall adoption of the asset class because they allow users to engage with the market.

However, being fairly nascent, cryptocurrency exchanges do suffer from common problems – server overloads when placing orders, comparatively high fees, lacking customer support, questionable policies, and so forth.

As the market matures, however, we see major players attempt to rectify the existing problems and provide clarity and transparency in a market which much needs it. Currently, the major exchanges in terms of traded volume are Binance, OKEx, Huobi, Coinbase, and a few others.

The Need for Speed

The speed of processing buy and sell orders is absolutely crucial for every trader. The importance is even greater for day traders who engage with the market multiple times every day, executing quick trades in order to take advantage of price fluctuations.

If there is one thing that’s characteristic of the cryptocurrency market – it’s volatility. Serious price swings are not uncommon for the majority of the preferred cryptocurrencies, which is why the trading platform needs to be blazing fast to enable the trader to best capitalize on every opportunity.

And while a lot of the exchanges out there struggle with this, BaseFEX – a fairly new yet rather comprehensive and easy-to-use cryptocurrency derivative exchange aims to make trading smooth, secure, and accessible for traders around the world.

One of the platform’s main focuses is speed in particular.

Speaking on the matter was Jesse Wu, CEO at BaseFEX, who noted:

“On BaseFEX, traders simply won’t see the message of server overload when placing orders. The trading engine will always accept traders’ order placements even in extreme market conditions. The architecture of BaseFEX’s trading engine was designed with high processing power in mind in the very beginning. Also we took advantage of a set of cutting-edge technologies from the ever-evolving internet industry to further ensure fast processing and high throughput. What’s more, each component of the system is carefully engineered so that idempotence is maintained – an engineering feature that is very hard to achieve, but once achieved high processing power and high reliability is then secured, because it make possible that exactly same components could run on multiple servers simultaneously without causing problem.”

BaseFEX starts with a leveraged swap product of BTCUSD Perpetual – a product which is a lot like futures but with no settlement at all. It allows traders to trade the BTC/USD price with a leverage of up to 100x. The team also promises to add more derivatives in the future.

 

 

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