In India, interest in the crypto derivatives market is growing

"We have seen a huge demand for futures trading among Indian cryptocurrency users [dall’inizio del 2020]”Said Sumit Gupta, CEO of CoinDCX, founder of an exchange aggregator.

Unocoin co-founder Sathvik Vishwanath said the exchange serves 26,000 monthly active users in India on a uniquely crypto platform and plans to launch derivative options within the next few months.

Delta Exchange CEO Pankaj Balani also said his team in Mumbai focused on growing derivatives in 2020. Indeed, this week Delta Exchange launched new options in bitcoin and ethereum, allowing users to make leverage bets on the size of the price swings of cryptocurrencies.

"Derivatives represent one of the most underrated areas of the crypto sector," said Balani. "If you look at daily FX trading, the derivatives are four or five times larger than the spot markets, but that's still not true of cryptocurrencies."

India attracts the giants of the crypto sector

Local startups are not the only ones to notice India's growing demand for cryptocurrency trading options. In November, global exchange giant Binance acquired India's leading digital asset platform, WazirX.

And it seems that this could be just one of many companies that will try to develop a presence in India by 2021. In fact, the CEO of Cashaa Kumar Gaurav said that his online banking platform now sees a monthly growth in the cryptocurrency activity of over 150%.

Therefore, he estimates that these Indian customers are involved in trading for a value of 1,000 bitcoins in daily volume, mainly from over-the-counter trading banks seeking to enter the boom of crypto derivatives.

Demand meets supply

Interest rate derivatives will be modeled on decentralized finance platforms (DeFi) such as Compound Finance, where traders earn interest on cryptocurrency deposits. Pooja Shah, Delta Exchange researcher, said that traders may prefer its startup rather than historic operators like BitMEX, because Delta offers more variety.

"While market leader BitMEX has 10 contracts, we have over 30 contracts available for trading," said Shah. "For example, the WRX futures listed on Delta within six hours of the opening of IEO on Binance.

… This made us the only platform where people could shorten WRX and block their IEO earnings. "Most of these Delta users are located in Southeast Asia, where incumbent traders such as the Chinese exchange OKEx are also looking to grow their derivatives offerings.

Lennix Lai, director of financial markets at OKEx, said that derivatives now account for nearly 66% of the platform's daily global volume, over $ 2 billion in options only. "In all likelihood, 2020 could be the turning point for cryptocurrency in India," said Unocoin's Vishwanath.