A futures contract is an agreement that obligates a trader to buy or sell an asset at a specific time, quantity and price.
Bitcoin futures help to bring in additional liquidity to the market and also provide opportunities for arbitrage.
As the trading value of Bitcoin varies, so too will the value of different Bitcoin futures contracts.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Like other cryptocurrencies, it’s also incredibly volatile. In March 2020, for instance, Bitcoin’s price practically halved in just a few days as markets tumbled amid fear about the pandemic. By early September, it had rebounded from about $4,000 to highs of $12,000—before promptly crashing again, dipping under $10,000.
Spot trading—the practice of buying and selling Bitcoin—forces traders to exchange cryptocurrencies at their current prices. But what if there was a way to lock in that price of $4,000, picking up the Bitcoin a couple of months later? So even if Bitcoin’s price hit $12,000, the counterparty would have to deliver the Bitcoin purchase with $4,000.
There is! It’s called a futures contract. A futures contract is an agreement between two traders that obligates a trader to buy or sell an asset at a specific time, quantity and price. For example, you might enter an agreement in mid-March to buy one Bitcoin for $4,000 for August 30. You could also be on the other side of the deal, agreeing to selling a Bitcoin for a fixed price. If you’re a buyer, you want the trading price of Bitcoin to go up, as you will be able to buy the cryptocurrency at below market value, while sellers want the opposite, profiting if Bitcoin were to decrease in price.BTC Price Buy Bitcoin
People have gone nuts for Bitcoin futures contracts, as big players like CME Group and TD Ameritrade have entered the space. When Bitcoin futures debuted on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) in December 2017, the CBOE website was overwhelmed. On Bakkt, the Bitcoin futures platform operated by the Intercontinental Exchange, about 11,000 futures contracts are traded each day.
In the past 24 hours (as of September 10), $2.03 billion worth of futures contracts were traded on Binance; $2.01 on Huobi; $1.85 on OKEx; and $1.05 on BitMEX.
Futures contracts and the evolution of asset classes
“Futures are an important part of the evolution of asset classes,” Nick Cowan, CEO of the GSX Group, told Decrypt. “They provide a benchmark—a Fair Value, or FV—of what the future value is, allowing arbitrage and liquidity to enter the market.”
Did you know?
Futures contracts originated with 17th-century Japanese samurai, who were paid in rice but were out most of the year doing whatever it is that 17th-century samurai do. But they wanted to ensure that the rice they were paid in, say, February held its value until August, so they traded contracts that obliged the signee to pay out the equivalent amount of rice in August, regardless of its current value.
The reason why you might trade Bitcoin futures as opposed to just, say, buying lots of Bitcoin worth $4,000 at the time, is that you don’t have to hold them yourself. (Our Japanese samurai analogy is helpful here—the Japanese samurai traded futures contracts so they wouldn’t have to store the rice themselves).
Some crypto exchanges, such as OKEx, have lower trading fees for futures contracts, which means that traders can squeeze a bit more out of their accounts by using futures.
When entering a futures contract, there are three ways a trader can exit their position: offsetting, rollovers and expiry. Offsetting is the most common, and occurs when a trader creates another futures contract with an equal value and size, making their effective obligations zero as they balance out. Rolling over is done by offsetting a position, but with an expiry date that is further into the future. Expiry is what you’d expect: it’s when a contract reaches its end date and the parties who hold the contract buy or sell at the agreed price.
Futures contracts and hedging
Another trading method for futures is hedging. Hedging is a way to reduce risk, which is useful for traders dealing with the volatility of cryptocurrencies.
Consider a trader who just bought three Bitcoin at a $10,000 a pop:
📈 She believes that the price of Bitcoin will rise by the end of the month, but wants to protect her position in case it goes down.
📅 To protect her position, she can enter a futures contract to sell one Bitcoin for $10,000 at the end of the month.
💰 At the end of the month, if Bitcoin has gone up, she will make a profit by selling the remaining two Bitcoin.
📉 If it goes down, she will lose money, but this will be limited as she can still sell one Bitcoin for $10,000.
Hedging reduces a trader’s overall risk, although it does also limit their potential profits.
The pros and cons of Bitcoin futures
First things first: Bitcoin futures are—by their very definition—speculative investments. In its decade-plus year history, Bitcoin has proven that the only constant is price volatility, and while the famed cryptocurrency might be on a bull run now, there’s no telling what tomorrow might bring for Bitcoin. If you speculate at the wrong time, you could be left stranded with a future asset that just isn’t worth it.
There’s also something to be said for being an experienced investor. To successfully utilize futures, an investor needs to understand market behavior, have enough knowledge to pay attention to reasonable market predictions, and enough sense to discard unfounded claims. Ultimately, Bitcoin futures are speculative, but it is possible to leverage good information on a best effort basis. Doing that, however, is not exactly easy, so one might argue that Bitcoin futures are not very accessible for the average person.
The inverse of this is that Bitcoin futures are a great way of getting ahead of a positive market price. If an investor times it right, there could, at least hypothetically, be major profit to be had by leveraging the Bitcoin Futures market.
Bitcoin futures also—counterintuitively—don’t involve holding any Bitcoin whatsoever. Instead, it simply involves trading Bitcoin at a future, pre-agreed upon date, whatever the price at that time may be. Understanding the market might not be the most accessible task, but you don’t even need an ounce of technology to get involved, not even a Bitcoin wallet.
Cash settlements
Bitcoin futures are settled with cash. Because no active Bitcoin trading takes place in a futures market, agreements are satisfied by trading at future, pre-agreed prices. Another oft-cited advantage of the Bitcoin futures market is that the possibility of settling in cash means that no complex software or technological expertise is really necessary in order to get involved in this arena.
Margin trading
One aspect of Bitcoin futures is margin trading, which essentially means that an investor only requires a percentage of a contract’s total in order to participate.
Leveraging 10-20% of a Bitcoin future means that an investment has both a high potential for profit, but also for a loss.
Crypto shorts
“Shorting” is an investment strategy that involves entering into an investment with the intention of generating profit by waiting for a drop in an asset’s market value. Futures and their value are in constant flux, so there are plenty of opportunities for a savvy investor to short on their Bitcoin future at any time.
For example, say the Bitcoin market is in the middle of a 2017-esque crypto winter. An investor can continue to repurchase their future, and then conceivably generate a profit for themselves.
Bitcoin futures platforms
Bitcoin futures are traded on several platforms. The top five by open interest at the time of writing are OKEx, Binance, CME, ByBit, and BitMEX.
OKEx: OXEx’s futures trading volume, the website projects, reaches up to $1.5 billion per day.
Binance: The Binance futures market is described on the Binance website as the “fastest-growing crypto-derivative exchange by trading volume,” and offers a leverage of 125x the margin.
CME: CME’s Bitcoin futures contract trades on Sunday through to Friday, from 5pm to 4pm Central Time, and expire on the last Friday of each month.
ByBit: ByBit offers up to 100x leverage and specializes in perpetual contracts. New users can, according to the ByBit website, receive up to $90 of user benefit.
BitMEX: BitMEX offers, according to its website, futures contracts that have “inverse, quanto, and linear payouts,” all of which are explained for users via this table.
Bitcoin futures: a note of caution
The world of Bitcoin futures isn’t all fun and games. Taking on a contract is a serious obligation, and if it reaches its expiry date, the trader has a legal obligation to fulfill it.
Futures could lose you a lot of money, as you could be forced to buy Bitcoin way above its current trading price. Cryptocurrencies are one of the most volatile asset classes available; as with all cryptocurrencies, trading Bitcoin is very risky.
Ethereum still has an uncapped total supply of ETH, its cryptocurrency. However, it does have a fixed yearly supply of 18 million ETH – something which Ethereum Classic does not.
Ethereum Classic has changed from an uncapped total supply to a total supply of somewhere between 210 million ETC and 230 million ETC. This change in and of itself is a massive difference between the two networks and will have varying impacts on the future of the projects.
The DAO Hard Fork
Following the DAO hack in 2016, Ethereum split into two blockchains – Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Ethereum was the result of the hard fork, which reversed the $50 million (at the time) USD theft. The hard fork made the hack transaction invalid, so investors in DAO could make up their losses.
Supporters of Ethereum Classic opted not to move to the new Ethereum blockchain following the DAO attack. However, they were in the minority (only about 10% of users remained on the Ethereum Classic blockchain), and therefore they never regained the $50 million USD lost in the theft.
ICOs and Investor Confidence
Ethereum is the leading blockchain for ICOs, holding over 80% of the market share. The ICO tokens are generally based on the ERC-20 token model. Ethereum is also constantly expanding its functionalities, and has better developer support than Ethereum Classic. Overall, Ethereum seems to enjoy vastly more investor confidence, and it remains the second-largest blockchain (at the time of writing).
While Ethereum Classic still works with smart contracts and dApps, it is a far less popular choice for ICOs than Ethereum. Ethereum has greater support from investors, and all round functionality is better on the new blockchain.
Consensus Algorithm
Ethereum is in the process of moving to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. This will make the blockchain faster, safer, and more democratic.
Ethereum Classic functions using a Proof of Work consensus algorithm, and has no plans to switch to PoS.
Market Cap
At the time of writing, Ethereum has a market cap of $19 billion USD.
At the time of writing, Ethereum Classic has a market cap of $531 million USD.
Ethereum is a public, open-source software platform built to support smart contract functionality. The network uses Ether (ETH) as its currency to process transactions and provide computational power to developers. The network also allows developers to build decentralised smart contract applications on top of it. For example, both Tether and Augur run on the Ethereum network.
The concept of a smart contract is critical to the understanding of Ethereum (ETH) vs Ethereum Classic (ETC). In simple terms, a smart contract is an agreement between two parties written in code. It sets out conditions that have to be met by each party for the contract to be executed. Once conditions are met, the contract is processed by the blockchain and executed without a need for third-party verification. Coupled with the immutability of the blockchain and its open-source design, smart contracts present an opportunity for many businesses. In fact, in 2019, Forbes identified more than 100 large American companies actively exploring blockchain technology, with many of them using the Ethereum network.
Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the original Ethereum blockchain. ETH and ETC share the same blockchain record before the July 2016 hard fork. Because of that, the initial design and functionality of these two networks were essentially the same. The hard fork in 2016 split the blockchain into Ethereum Classic and Ethereum, dividing the community at the time. Most developers chose to upgrade to the new Ethereum protocol, limiting the size of the ETC community and its ability to improve the network.
Uniswap is a popular decentralized exchange for cryptocurrency. It is one of the cornerstone projects of the Ethereum and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
In this post we’ll break down what Uniswap is, how it works and why it matters. We make some generalizations for simplicity and assume no prior knowledge of Uniswap.
To fully appreciate Uniswap and decentralized exchange, it helps to first understand how traditional trading works using services such as Vanguard or Coinbase.
When you buy a share of Apple (AAPL) on Vanguard or units of Bitcoin (BTC) on Coinbase, you are “hiring” Vanguard and Coinbase as a middle man. They take your money and buy the given asset off an exchange order book: a list of buyers and sellers. The price you get for AAPL or BTC is the price another party has pre-agreed to sell or buy at.
Traditional trading generally has these characteristics:
There is a trusted middle man to execute your trades (Vanguard, Coinbase)
There is an order book filled with buyers (bids) and sellers (asks) that determine the value of your trade
You don’t directly hold your own assets – the middle men hold them on your behalf
You are required to provide personal information and be known to trade
There are many advantages to this traditional trading model. For example – it is very well-established and powers very large, efficient markets. If you’ve bought a stock at a brokerage, or cryptocurrency on any major exchange (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, etc.) this is the model you were interacting with.
What is Uniswap?
Uniswap is an exchange system for cryptocurrency that operates on the Ethereum blockchain. Uniswap is an open source protocol, meaning anyone can interact with it and understand how it works.
Uniswap focuses exclusively on trading Ether (ETH) and Ethereum-based assets. At the time of writing, the size of this market was over $100 billion.
So how does Uniswap compare to the traditional trading model?
Here are 4 interesting examples of how Uniswap differs:
There is no trusted middle man to make trades. You trade directly from your own Ethereum self-custody wallet (e.g. MetaMask) using the Ethereum blockchain. This is what makes Uniswap a decentralized exchange (DEX)
There is no order book! The price for buying or selling is determined through automated market making, which is handled by smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain (more on this later)
You directly hold your Ethereum-based assets in your own wallet. There is no custody middle man
Your personal identity is not known (or required) to use Uniswap or Ethereum directly
Automated market making
If Uniswap isn’t using an order book, how exactly does it figure out what the price is for buying and selling in any given moment?
Instead of an order book, Uniswap developed a clever mechanism called automated market making (AMM). AMM allows Uniswap exchanges to always provide a price, even for very small markets, without requiring buyers and sellers to pre-list their orders at fixed prices.
For this automated market making design to work, Uniswap replaced order books with a new, novel concept: liquidity pools.
Liquidity pools
Instead of relying on buyers and sellers who pre-agree on prices to form an order book, Uniswap incentivizes investors (aka “LPs” or “Liquidity Providers”) to pool their Ethereum-based assets into Uniswap smart contracts in exchange for a share of the transaction fees.
These invested Ethereum-based assets are allocated to trades automatically by smart contracts based on the rules of the Uniswap protocol. As more trades are made, the investors (LPs) accrue more transaction fees.
Every trading pair on Uniswap has a liquidity pool. Anyone in the world can create Uniswap trading pairs or provide liquidity to them without permission.
One of the most popular trading pairs on Uniswap at the time of writing is USDC-ETH. This pair let’s you exchange USDC for ETH or vice versa.
To become an investor in the USDC-ETH liquidity pool you must contribute an equal ratio (50%/50%) of both assets into the pool. To invest $1,000 you would need to contribute $500 in USDC and $500 in ETH.
Liquidity tokens (LP tokens)
Investors are willing to pool their assets in Uniswap because there is a financial incentive: they get a share of transaction fees (currently: 0.30% of every trade).
When investors pool their assets into Uniswap, they get liquidity tokens (“LP tokens”) back in return. These LP tokens are conceptually similar to owning stock or equity – they represent a direct claim on a portion of the total liquidity pool and accumulated transaction fees.
If you become an investor in the USDC-ETH trading pair, you will contribute USDC and ETH in equal amounts and get a Uniswap USDC-ETH LP token in return.
When investors want to cash out of a given pool, they simply trade in their Uniswap LP token and are given assets from the pool according to their percentage ownership. Because of the accumulation of fees, the amount of assets you receive should be greater than what you put in.
We won’t go deeply into Uniswap LP returns analysis here, but if you are interested in learning more, we suggest understanding more about impermanent loss (divergence loss). Impermanent loss is a key factor to consider when investing in Uniswap liquidity pools.
Using this liquidity pool system, Uniswap has attracted billions (in USD terms) of capital from investors. At the time of writing, there is over $1.5B invested, which is powering thousands of decentralized trading pairs!
Uniswap vs Coinbase Example
To further highlight the differences (and similarities) between traditional trading and decentralized trading using Uniswap, we can compare the same trade on both platforms.
Buying $100 of USDC with Ether (ETH) on Coinbase
Pre-trade Approval: Sign up and go through identity verification process
Price discovery: Order book (bids and asks) – you are matched with an existing price on the USDC-ETH order book
Speed: Near-instant
Custody: Custodial. You trust Coinbase to keep assets safe while holding them on platform (unless you transfer to a self-custody wallet)
Buying $100 of USDC with Ether (ETH) on Uniswap
Approval to trade: None. You need only an Ethereum wallet
Speed: Depends on transaction fees you specify to Ethereum, but likely 15 – 45 seconds
Custody: Self-custody. You trust yourself to keep assets safe in your own wallet
Why use Uniswap?
We’ve covered how Uniswap is different than traditional trading and exchanges, but why is it useful?
Where are the areas where someone might prefer Uniswap over a custodial alternative like Coinbase?
1. It’s non-custodial
While the quality and security of cryptocurrency exchanges has improved dramatically in the past decade, there still are an alarming number of exchange hacks that result in loss of customer funds.
Because custodial exchanges hold huge sums of assets on behalf of users, they are constantly under attack. When these attacks succeed, customers holding their assets at the exchange are often left powerless.
Uniswap, as a decentralized exchange, does not require you to give up control of your assets to trade. You can trade on Uniswap via Ethereum from the comfort of your own wallet.
Self-custodying cryptocurrency is not a riskless activity and requires its own set of best practices, but it does eliminate exchange hack risk.
2. It’s completely permissionless
Trading on traditional exchanges requires permission in at least two forms:
You have to be approved to trade or transfer by providing your identity and sensitive personal information
The assets that are available are selected at the discretion of the exchange
On Uniswap, you don’t need to be approved to trade, transfer or invest in liquidity pools. Anyone in the world with an internet connection and an Ethereum wallet can participate. Users who value privacy or those living in countries with restrictive capital controls may appreciate this aspect of Uniswap and decentralized exchange.
Uniswap is also not limited in what trading pairs it can offer or support. Any person can create a trading pair between two Ethereum-based assets and seed the initial liquidity pool. This results in a huge combination of trading pairs for a myriad of assets.
3. It has unique trading pair support
Thanks to the permissionless nature, there’s assets and trading pairs on Uniswap you simply can’t get on custodial alternatives.
Because it so easy to spin up a trading pair on Uniswap, it’s often the very first place new Ethereum-based assets are listed and available. Even when trading pairs are later added on custodial exchanges (Coinbase Pro, Binance et al) – Uniswap often has very competitive liquidity and fees.
Final thoughts
Uniswap is one of the breakaway success stories of Ethereum and DeFi. It has become one of the most important parts of the DeFi ecosystem and has proven that decentralized applications can compete (and sometimes win) versus centralized alternatives.
It will be exciting to watch what innovations the Uniswap team comes up with next and seeing the project grow as crypto becomes increasingly mainstream.
SushiSwap is the newest decentralised finance (DeFi) liquidity pool platform. With SushiSwap, people can add their tokens into the liquidity pools and earn. In this article, we’ll have a look at the Sushi Swap platform and how to participate in the liquidity pool. Anyone can participate.
SushiSwap is a platform that allows anyone to provide liquidity. In return, the person gets rewarded with token(s) and SUSHI tokens.
As of September 4, 2020, there are 1 billion dollars of locked liquidity.
Possibility of very high APY (up to 1,000%) on some liquidity pools. You can check the current yields on SushiBoard.
Why is SushiSwap so popular?
Sushi Swap markets itself as an “improved and community-friendly” Uniswap. Unlike a traditional exchange like Binance where they employ market makers, SushiSwap is a community-oriented platform where users provide liquidity. In return, they get rewarded. Indeed, the users are the market makers.
SUSHI token
SUSHI tokens are given as rewards for liquidity mining. The token allows its holders to participate in the governance of the platform and entitles them to a portion of the fees paid to the protocol by traders. For the governance of the platform, SUSHI holders can submit a SushiSwap Improvement Proposal (SIP) which token holders can vote on with their tokens.
Of course, some people also speculate on the prices of SUSHI and the token can be traded on major exchanges such as Binance, FTX and OKEx exchanges.
Advantages of SushiSwap
There is no KYC (Know Your Customer) policy. This means anyone can trade and contribute to the liquidity pools. The platform is permissionless, meaning anyone can contribute millions of dollars without asking for permission.
Earn tokens from Sushi Swap. SUSHI is Sushi Swap’s native token. When you contribute to the liquidity pool, you earn sushi tokens. You can exchange SUSHI for ETH.
Sushi Swap model: 0.25% go directly to the active liquidity providers and 0.05% get converted back to SUSHI and is rewarded to sushi holders.
Sounds interesting? Let’s visit Sushi Swap’s home page.
SushiSwap beginners guide
When you first arrive on Sushi Swap’s home page, you’ll see this:
Click on “Unlock Wallet” or “See The Menu”, either way you will need to connect your ETH wallet in order to this platform.
Sushi Swap has the option to use MetaMask, WalletConnect or many other non-custodial wallets. Pick the one of your choice.
Give permission for Meta Mask or Wallet Connect to connect to Sushi Swap. Once you’re connected, you’re ready to add your tokens into the liquidity pools.
You’re presented with various liquidity pools (LPs). Each liquidity pool has a different annual percentage yield (APY).
In this example, I’ll contribute to the ETH-USDT pool. I add my USDT into the liquidity pool. In return, I’ll get a percentage of USDT and SUSHI tokens. Think of Sushi Swap as a “community revenue share” model.
To contribute to the liquidity pool, click “Approve USDT-ETH UNI-V2 LP” and give your Meta Mask permission to move your tokens into the liquidity pool.
Now what? You wait. The “SUSHI earned” box should populate with your earned SUSHI. You can withdraw your SUSHI token anytime by clicking on “Harvest”.
2020 roundup and new roadmap!
Many things have happened within the Sushiswap ecosystem in the last months: it is now time for a quick recap and to look at what the future will bring to this project!
The number of all the partnerships finalized by the protocol is countless, but one of the most important ones, if not the most important, is certainly the merger with Yearn. The news also sparked controversies: Sushiswap was still considered a sort of “copycat” of Uniswap by some, and when Andre Cronje (Yearn’s father) wrote an article on how it is difficult to build in Defi and how conversely it is easy for anyone to just copy other people’s code, this wasn’t seen as really coherent. The collaboration was born to allow the two teams to cooperate on Deriswap.
Nevertheless, Sushiswap has been evolving so much that, according to Mira Christanto (one of Messari’s data analysts) they have “put their past behind” and, not being backed by Venture Capitals, they can move faster than competitors. January has seen a real growth in Sushiswap’s TVL (now at $2.1 billion), mostly at the expense of Uniswap’s.
Among the important milestones in 2020, we find Onsen, the new Sushiswap liquidity mining incentivization program which replaces the old Menu of the week. It brings communities together into the ecosystem and allows voted tokens to become accredited and participate in the mining program. The website also has a new layout of and a lite version.
2021 Roadmap
As the new year has already begun, it is also interesting to have a look at what Sushiswap is working on for 2021. The team released a long and detailed roadmap in early January. Notable upgrades are the following:
Mirin will be the new upgraded version of Sushiswap’s V3 protocol. It will include many new features like franchised pools, double yield, dynamic yield rebalancing, and many more as you can read here.
Bentobox (which should have launched in January) was born in the team’s mind as a new Lending Platform. While they were was working on its code though, it became something more. In simple terms, it will be a single vault that holds all tokens for any protocols and future extensions. It will support several oracles and it will also benefit all the $SUSHI holders.
Miso (Minimal Initial Sushi Offering) will be a sort of token launchpad, designed to drive new projects’ launches on the platform. It will include crowd sale options, IDOs (Initial Dex Offering), auctions, and more. We could think of it as something similar to Binance’s launchpad.
As Ethereum fees are and will keep growing in the next future until ETH2 will be a reality, most platforms are studying alternative solutions for their users such as Layer 2 possibilities. Unlike Uniswap, which is working on Optimistic Rollups, Sushiswap decided to move in sync with the greater Yearn ecosystem and thus will probably offer Zk-rollups options.
Together with all these big news, Sushiswap is also planning to move to a new domain as the old one, in their view, is not enough to describe the diversity of the platform anymore. A transition to a fully decentralized governance structure is also planned by the end of 2021. Last but not least, Sushiswap has created a proposal page for people to express their ideas on what they would like to see on the platform. Everyone can be a chef is the place where you can voice your opinion if you like to suggest new ideas.
FAQs
Is it risky to provide liquidity to SushiSwap?
The pool could get hacked if the code isn’t audited. There have been cases of hackers draining funds from smart contracts. It helps if the code is audited by a reputable firm. In the case of SushiSwap, it has been given a “security review” (not an audit) by Quantstamp. 10 issues were identified but they do not appear to be fatal. Subsequently, Peckshield had completed an audit on SushiSwap. They found no critical or high severity issues relating to business logistics but 2 high severity opsec issues that need to be fixed through extra care with deployment.What is the reward model of Sushi Swap?
0.25% go directly to the active liquidity providers and 0.05% gets converted back to sushi and is distributed to active SUSHI holders.