Binance Futures are doing about $500Million a day in notional volume with their new perpetual BTC:USDT futures contract. 

Like BitFinex's new futures, Binance uses USDT margin collateral and pays out linear PnL in a zero sum game between users.

Binance recently acquired JEX, a low-tier futures exchange, and has currently only launched the BTC:USDT futures on their platform.

In contrast to Bitfinex, Binance is doing healthy volumes. This is likely due to Binance's lax KYC/AML requirements whereas Bitfinex requires users to be fully verified to trade Derivatives.

Time will tell whether Binance expands their offering to inverse, deliverable, or other crypto outside of BTC.

BitFinex, the top spot-margin exchange in crypto, has finally launched its derivatives products.

The two contracts are BTC:USDT perpetual and ETH:USDT perpetual. This means they have linear payout structure and USDT is the collateral and PnL currency.

The unique part of the offering is not just the USDT collateral (inverse crypto dominates the market), but also the way the rate is set. Instead of an ongoing funding rate, the contracts charge the premium/discount for going long/short upon execution of the trade. This means no carrying costs bleeding you dry while you are in a longer term position.

However, the volume on these new contracts has been shockingly bad. They barely crack 0.01% of marketshare compared to the broader derivatives space in crypto. There are a number of reasons why this has been the case:

1. Verification required - because the contracts use USDT and because BitFinex has had run-ins with the CFTC in the past, they have required all derivatives traders to be verified accounts. This is a major restriction that just does not exist on the top exchanges.

2. Requiring USDT - these contracts require that the trader have USDT, so in essence the products are being used to help drive use of USDT, but the reality is traders have crypto and want to earn more crypto going long or short, it is that simple. By not allowing traders to use their BTC or ETH or other to trade, they are missing out on a huge part of the market.

3. No marketing - they have not been very loud about the derivatives offering at all. This is partly due to the regulatory environment where they have to be careful how they promote derivatives. But either way, people won't trade unless there is more noise about it.

4. Education - because it is an unusual perpetual futures contract (linear payout, using USDT, unique funding mechanism), traders are just not familiar with these aspects and there should be a more clear guide for how they trade, including a demo version.

Bakkt's one-day deliverable futures have been a complete flop. On any given day they have single-digit volume numbers and they were celebrating 212 contracts traded.

CoinFLEX, an offshore exchange trading BTCUSDT deliverable futures, has over 100x that volume, and the overall cash-settled futures market has over 1,000x that volume.

So why did Bakkt fail so badly? A number of reasons:

1. No/low leverage: crypto traders love to use leverage and when done wisely it is a critical part of a trader's risk management toolkit. Bakkt has 1-day expirees and no leverage.

2. The market doesnt want deliverable futures: deliverable futures require that the exchange have reliable USD access for the longs to deliver. Some offshore exchanges like CoinFLEX use stablecoins as a proxy for USD, but for truly deliverable futures that institutions want to trade, this requires a solid banking connection. But the reality is most traders at the moment in crypto just want to move crypto around and earn more bitcoin on trades, and they want the profits fluid, liquid and available right away. This is what the top exchanges in the space use: BitMEX, OKex, Huobi, Deribit, and they just arent interested in juggling two types of assets when they can just use bitcoin.

3. Verification barrier: if you want to trade on OKex or BitMEX you just provide an email. If you want to trade on Bakkt, you have a higher barrier to entry because you have to have a fully verified account and go through a longer, tedious onboarding process and regulators will be scraping the trading activity there very aggressively and potentially invading your privacy down the line.

4. Bad market timing: I saved this for last because it is the worst excuse, but there is currently a market environment that is quite bearish, volumes are relatively low, and a lot of value in crypto, particularly lower on the totem pole, is bleeding out as you read this.

Time will tell if Bakkt goes the way of Cboe (unlikely because they are a separate venture and are quite focused on driving value, rather than being a pet project like Cboe), or if they will start making an actual dent in Bitcoin-Dollar futures marketshare.

 FTX has come on the scene this year, a creation of marketmaking firm Alameda Research.

They run perpetual contracts on the top 5 crypto assets and have leveraged tokens that are like pseudo ETFs which take positions in the perpetual contracts to track the value of 1x short (HEDGE), 3x short /long(BEAR/BULL), 10x short/long (DOOM/MOON). There is also a fixed maturity "MOVE" contract that is trading the volatility of the contract, i.e., betting on how many points in a day a given index will move.

Margining on FTX is done relative to USD, which is a new model in the industry which usually just allows one type of collateral in futures trading. This approach is like a hybrid of BitFinex's margin trading and the existing dominant futures exchanges.

FTX also offers interesting index contracts like SHIT which is the shittiest shitcoins, ALT which is the "blue chip" shitcoins, and "mid" which is the mid-tier shitcoins.
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FTX also has its own token, FTT, which is bought and burned and has incentives for lower fees on the exchange (but is not trade-mining). As such, they list OKB, BNB, HT, and LEO on there -- the tokens for OKex, Binance, Huobi, and BitFinex. So for investors in the exchange tokens, FTX is a great place to manage your risk at any point to hedge price variation.

And of course, they also offer standard fixed maturity contracts for next two quarters (currently December and March). This makes them a firm competitor for OKex and BitMEX as they offer multiple forms of deposit, a unique margining system, an affiliate program that pays out 30%, and innovative contracts and products with the leveraged token.