What is Delta Exchange
Delta is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. Currently offering futures contracts for BTC, ETH, XRP and XLM offering up to 100x leverage.
Cryptocurrencies are geography agnostic and so is Delta. They want to be able to serve traders all over the globe and that’s why they have taken the strategic call to not have any fiat interaction on Delta. All derivative contracts on Delta are settled in crypto.
Who’s behind Delta
Pankaj Balani (CEO): has spent over 6 years in derivatives trading in Hong Kong and India at wall street giants like UBS. He has deep experiences in derivatives, quantitative finance and Asian equity markets. Pankaj also helped build and grow an e-commerce business in India which went on to raise Series C round of financing.
Jitender Tokas (CBO): has worked with Citigroup in India and GIC in Singapore. In his 8+ years career in financial services, Jitender has been both an institutional investor and equity research analyst and helped two Indian Internet companies raise money from public markets.
Saurabh Goyal (CTO) is a serial entrepreneur and a seasoned tech leader. He first cofounded Housing.com which went on to raise money from Softbank. Saurabh then built and sold a FoodTech company, TinyOwl that scaled to 1.5mn users, 1200 employees and raised USD ~25mn from the likes of Sequoia, Matrix and Nexus. Saurabh was also the Director of Engineering at Hostar — a video streaming platform which has over 20mn users and handles ~5mn concurrent users.
Why Crypto Derivatives Matter
Derivatives are an important segment of global financial markets. Derivatives offer various types of risk protections, enable innovative trading strategies and are key contributors to the well-being and stability of the financial system.
The building blocks of fiat-led financial markets are currently being created in the crypto ecosystem. They believe derivatives is one such piece that will continue to gain prominence as both crypto markets and investors mature.
It is worth noting that there’s more to derivatives than just leveraged speculation. Derivatives have the potential to serve as important risk management tools for long-term HODLers, miners and even day traders.
Well-functioning crypto derivatives markets will lead to lower volatility (as traders can go both long and short), higher liquidity and will make the currently rampant market manipulation harder.
Why another Crypto Derivatives Exchange
Currently derivatives are available only on a handful of crypto exchanges. While there’s ample liquidity in Futures on top coins, there’s significant discontent in the trader community due to questionable practices of some of the trading venues and wide-spread market manipulation.
The crypto derivatives community is looking for alternatives that provide a fair, reliable and safe way to trade crypto derivatives. They aim to be this alternative. They aim to be a traders first exchange.
What do they stand for
Mission: To accelerate the advancement of the cryptocurrency financial system
Vision: To build the most liquid and trusted global cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that can ably to serve both retail and institutional traders.
Fairness: They are committed to providing a fair trading venue to all our clients, irrespective of their size or significance.
Integrity: They are committed to be honest in all dealings with clients, business partners and vendors.
Transparency: They are committed to be transparent and consistent about various exchange policies (matching engine, risk management) to ensure a predictable and reliable trading experience.
How do we plan to achieve our goals
Financial Innovation: They have a well-defined pipeline for augmenting the financial products listed on Delta. This includes Futures contracts on leading altcoins, Perpetual contracts, settlement in multiple cryptocurrencies and Options.
Tech leadership: Our trade matching engine has been built in-house from scratch, for scale. It is supported by robust risk engine, strong APIs and Enterprise-grade security. We are striving to make 24/7 availability, reliability and liquidity the defining features of Delta
Customer focus: As an exchange, their responsibility is first to their traders. They focused on providing the traders on Delta the best possible and fair trading experience.
Conclusion
After using Delta Exchange for the past few weeks its main issue is that of all infantile exchanges. Liquidity. Delta also sees this as their primary concern and have offered incentives for traders to use their platform. Offering trading competitions, fee reductions and the recently announced free Bitcoin for depositing 0.01BTC on the platform. In all other aspects of the platform it is a joy to use. Trade execution is fast with minimal delay, fees are competitive, there are multiple trading pairs, the platform is easy to use and their is no shadiness like we see on other exchanges (cough cough BitMEX) I am optimistic about the future of Delta, as long as it can get past its shortcomings.