The crypto exchange industry has rapidly developed over the past two to three years. We saw the rise of cryptocurrency derivatives. Platforms like BitMEX, Deribit, and FTX seemingly came out of nowhere and consumed the market share of more traditonal exchanges like Coinbase, Bitfinex, and Binance. Now, In steps Interdax.
Interdax aims to even further develop the industry in a different but interesting way. Through gamification. Primarily trading competitions.
The Foundations of Interdax
Interdax was founded all the way back in 2017 by a team of former financial professionals. Hailing from the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and Goldman Sachs among many others.
Though they were founded in 2017 they remained relatively quiet until late 2018 continuing to develop the platform until they eventually came out of their dark lit room to announce their project. Eventually launching it in beta in 2019.
The Interdax Platform
On its surface Interdax is your run of the mill derivatives exchange. Having what you would expect. A straight forward user interface. Fees for trading are the industry standard. Opening and closing orders is smooth and easy. It has all your standard order types. Limit, stop limit, market, and stop market orders.
Liquidity
Liquidity is okay. Not the best, but certainly not the worst. You will have trouble getting filled if you are trading large sizes but medium to small traders will have no issues. And if the platform can continue to attract more users then these liquidity problems will begin to lessen.
Trading Pairs and Margin
Another issue I have is the lack of trading pairs. At the time of writing there is only one trading pair. A Bitcoin perpetual swap contract. Although understandable that an exchange in its infancy has only one trading pair it would be nice to have more.
Interdax offers the much loved support for up to 100x leverage.
Security/KYC and AML
In terms of security Interdax has standard 2FA as well as support for PGP email encryption.
Interdax though having offices in London is registered in Seychelles. This means that its not subject to strict KYC and AML laws. KYC is thus not required on the Interdax platform.
Interdax Trading Competitions
But reviewing a standard derivatives exchange like above is not really what this article is about. We’re trying to see what new ideas Interdax are bringing. And those new ideas are its trading competitions.
How They Work
Trading competitions aren’t very complex. You simply trade for an allotted time period with a certain amount of capital and the winner is the one who has the highest return.
Competitions on Interdax work exactly like this. You trade for a certain time period and the winner is the one who has the highest return. Also recieving a prize in Bitcoin on top of their earnings from the competition.
How to Sign Up
Signing up for a trading competition is very simple. You simply navigate to the battles tab on the top of the screen as shown.
Once there you will be presented with this screen below. It lists all the current active and future tournaments you can join. It gives information on the prize as well as the required ‘trading stack’. The trading stack is essentially the amount of Bitcoin you will be trading with. You need to have this in your account balance to enter the competition.
During my time using the platform the required trading stack for competitions varied from to 0.01BTC to 2BTC so there’s something for everyone.
To join the competition you click view and will be presented with the screen below. Click join to get signed up.
After clicking join you will be asked to move Bitcoin from your account into your battle sub-account. You can cancel any time before the competition starts and these funds will be moved back into your main account. Similarly after the competition ends these funds will be moved back into your main account plus or minus any profit or loss.
Congrats you’re all signed up. Once the competition begins you can view the leader board and competition from the battles tab to see how you’re doing.
Other Exchange Competitions
Interdax is not the first exchange nor the largest to do cryptocurrency trading competitions. Back in 2019 FTX launched its ‘Battle Royale’ trading competition very successfully with hundreds of traders entering. The competition lasted a number of weeks. But, it seems FTX only used that as a marketing ploy to draw in new users to the platform. They have only ran one smaller competition since.
In comparison to the competition Interdax seems like the only exchange that is actually committed to running consistent competitions for traders with constant open competitions for every type of trader. From ‘Saturday Skirmish’ to ‘Weekly Warriors’.
Conclusion
Interdax is not without a number of flaws which have been pointed out in this article. Lack of trading pairs and liquidity issues to name the main two. But these issues will fix themselves if the platform can continue to grow.
What Interdax does do right however is it trading competitions which I feel is the selling point that will generate the most interest. Crypto trading competitions are good in the sense that if you are an active trader you have nothing to lose. If you lose money that’s money you would of lost anyway on another platform. But if you trade successfully you can manage to net a nice bonus.
Having been in around crypto trading circles for a number of years now there has always been strong demand for attempts at gamifying crypto trading and if Interdax can continue on their positive path forward chances are that they will successfully meet that demand.
