The Coinbase-backed crypto derivatives platform Blade has announced on January 15, 2020 that it will offer zero-fee trading for its clients beginning next month.
With this service, Blade will become the very first crypto exchange that offers zero-fee trading in bitcoin perpetuals. These perpetuals are contracts with no expiration date that resemble a margin-based spot market and actually trade very close to the underlying reference price.
The maximum leverage on these perpetual contracts is 150x. The no-expiry feature means that investors can hold these contracts as long as they want without facing the risk of liquidation.
In addition to the new fee-less service, Blade is considering to drop the monthly fee of $10 that it currently charges traders for using the platform.
Blade has a unique target audience – it primarily caters to the rich east Asian markets with its products. One example of such “catering” can be seen on Blade’s website: the platform offers 6 trading pairs, two of which are against fiat currencies – the Korean won and the US dollar. The rest are pegged against the USDT.
One interesting fact is that while based in San Francisco, Blade’s trading services are not available to US-based traders due to regulatory restrictions.
The seed funding round for Blade amassed $4.3 million from prominent crypto players and VCs such as Coinbase, Justin Kan, Slow Ventures, A.Capital, SV Angel and Adam D’Angelo.
There is a growing demand for crypto derivatives products and major platforms are competing to offer the best, cheapest services to their clients. One competitor for Blade is definitely the leader in the crypto derivatives space, BitMEX. But one trend that is emerging is smaller players that target niche markets and improve their products constantly.
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