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There has been a huge rise in the number of exchanges offering their own exchange tokens. The early days were brought about by Binance’s BNB token. Which launched during the famous bull run of 2017. Since its launch, returning over 13000%. Other major Exchanges like, Bitfinex, Huobi, Bitmax, Kucoin, among others have all launched their own exchange tokens since. The newest exchange token to be launched is FTT. Backed also by a brand new derivatives exchange FTX. But where does FTT fit into this already competitive market? Does it have good value propositions? Lets find out, this is our FTT Token Review.

The Exchange Itself

To review an Exchange token without reviewing the exchange itself would be futile. You can have the best value propositions ever but if you’re exchange is poor then your token will reflect that. We have previously gone in depth on the FTX Exchange in our FTX Exchange Review. However we will cover it briefly here.

As previously mentioned FTX is primarily a Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange. Derivatives trading is where the vast majority of cryptocurrency trading occurs and it is this market that FTX is targeting. The current market leader being BitMEX which has traded over 1 Trillion dollars in the past year alone.

FTX is currently giving BitMEX a run for its money. BitMEX’s essential monopoly on cryptocurrency derivatives trading lead them to complacency. Issues with downtime, order submission errors, among others all allowed FTX to pick up the pieces as traders looked for alternatives.

One of the main hurdles exchanges have right out of the gate is liquidity. If you don’t have liquidity you cannot attract users. FTX had this issue solved right from the beginning having been born from one of the largest liquidity providers in crypto Alameda Research.

FTX having solved the liquidity problem had the opportunity to put 100% of their attention towards innovation and innovate they did.

To put it in perspective BitMEX the major derivatives exchange in crypto only currently has 8 markets. Whereas FTX has over 100 tradeable pairs. Not only does it have a large quantity of markets but of these markets some are brand new. FTX has markets for leveraged tokens, indices for privacy coins, altcoins, and DeFi tokens, prediction markets, hashrate futures. Its innovative features such as Quant Zone which allows users to create quantitative trading scripts directly on the platform, and its trading competitions have enticed many traders to sign up for the exchange.

The Tokens Value Proposition

FTT’s token utility is not too dissimilar to something like Bitfinex’s LEO token. However, there are some unique elements.

Much like LEO and Binance’s BNB, FTX carries out token buy back and burns based off of revenue generated by the exchange. Currently 33% of all fees earned by FTX will be used to buy and burn FTT tokens. The thought process behind buy and burn schemes is to drive up the price of FTT tokens by continuously reducing the supply. What is however unique to FTT is the concept of socialized gains in which a portion of money added to the exchanges insurance fund will be used to buy back FTT.

The insurance fund is something exclusive to cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges and ensures users on the exchange are liquidated properly should their not be enough liquidity from traders to close someones position.

We’ve performed backtests and live simulations to see how FTX will fare during large market movements. While other futures exchanges suffered from clawbacks, FTX managed to net increase their insurance fund by a sizeable amount thanks to its unique backstop liquidity provider program. For instance, during a recent market move, Okex incurred ~$3 million of clawbacks. Meanwhile, our demo simulation which mirrored positions on OKEx demonstrated no clawbacks and a net gain of a million to our insurance fund.

FTT Token Whitepaper

Holders off FTT get the standard fee reduction on the exchange depending on how much FTT they hold. The fee reduction applies to both the live markets and OTC trading.

FTT can also be used alongside USD, USD Stablecoins, and BTC as collateral (to prevent liquidation) for trading on the exchange.

Conclusion

We pointed out the requirements for a successful exchange token at the beginning of this article. You need a solid exchange, which can generate consistent liquidity and attract new users. And you need a token that is actually worth something which will encourage people to buy it. You can’t just print a new ERC-20 token and throw some marketing behind it. Value propositions such as buybacks, and fee reductions, competition entrys, among others are absolute crucial.

In terms of both a solid exchange and token value propositions FTT has both

Bitcoin has had its most poorly performing week since 2018. At the time of writing it has fallen just over 2000$ since the weekly candle opened. However, price only tells us half the story.

People have been quick to put blame for price movements on the launch of the much anticipated Bakkt futures market, or potential drops in hashrate. But now courtesy of the TokenAnalyst we can get valuable data on how large players in the market are moving capital, and in doing so gain insight into their motivations.

When taking a look at the data we will primarily be focusing on both Binance and BitMEX as these were the two exchanges where the most activity took place.

BitMEX

When taking a look at the data for BitMEX we see the large dip in price on the price chart (Top graph) which took us from 9500 to 8500 in one hour. In the following 3 hours after this fall in price on the net in/out flow chart (Bottom Graph) we see just under 8000 Bitcoin deposited.

Binance

When we inspect the data for Binance we see strong similarities. A dump followed by large amounts of deposits in the proceeding hours. Not quite as much Bitcoin was deposited to Binance as Bitmex. Deposits coming in at 5765 Bitcoin. Nonetheless a very significant amount of Bitcoin.

However, it is important to note that unlike BitMEX, Binance does not purely handle Bitcoin transactions but a multitude of currencies. An important one to Bitcoin is the stable coin Tether. Based on the chart above we can see a huge net outflow of Tether to the value of 35 Million Dollars. This contrasts heavily with the net inflow of Bitcoin to exchanges. We looked further into Tether withdrawal data and we saw similar trends across a number of exchanges. But now we have a dilemma, where is the Tether being sent? That question is currently unclear but whichever market players are harvesting these Tethers they have not deposited them on any other exchange except one. Poloniex, where 10 million were deposited. To put that in perspective Poloniex only does 10 million dollars in total volume a day.

Conclusion

To answer the question we gave at the start of the article. What is the motivation behind these large flows of capital? It is truly hard to know the full story, but one possible suggestion are large quantitative firms who engage in arbitrage where as they make money in price differences across exchanges. Read our article on Alameda Research to get more of an insight into how quantitative trading in crypto works. Another is miners in China whose energy costs have risen selling their Bitcoin for Tether. Nonetheless it is very interesting to see how blockchain is giving us a perspective into how financial markets work beyond just movements of price.

The Foundations of FTX

The FTX Exchange first began live trading in Q1 of 2019 and since its foundation has been very aggressive in its growth strategies. Aiming to take the down the top dog in cryptocurrency derivatives BitMEX. One such growth strategy is the addition of new and innovative trading products. Products such as new indexes and leveraged tokens have helped the exchange gain notoriety in the past few months.

FTX launches new trading products every week, and this week was no different. Launching their markets for Ethereum Classic and their brand new exchange token index.

It is no surprise that FTX has been consistently adding more markets. They are effectively owned by Alameda Research. One of the largest quantitative trading firms and liquidity providers in the cryptocurrency space. They make their money by providing liquidity and exploiting market inefficiencies. The more markets they have at their disposal the more money they make. This is partially the reason why FTX now has the largest amount of markets for any cryptocurrency derivatives exchange.

Ethereum Classic

FTX Launched 5 tradeable pairs for Ethereum Classic. ETC Perpetual Swap, ETC September Futures, and 3 leveraged ETC Tokens. ETCHEDGE, ETCBULL, and ETCBEAR. Leveraged tokens are ERC20 tokens which seek a return that corresponds to 3 times the daily return. For example, if you buy ETCBEAR tokens you make 3x the loss of ETC, while if you buy bull tokens you make 3x the gain of ETC.

Exchange Token Index

Perhaps the most exciting product FTX has released in a while is its Exchange Token Index. The index is comprised of 4 tokens. Bitfinex’s LEO token, Huobi Token, OKEX’s OKB token, and Binances BNB token. Exchange tokens have bucked the trend of Altcoins in the 6 months. While Altcoins hit rock bottom, exchange tokens actually made positive ROIs. This index allows traders to exploit that market and gain exposure to the major 4 exchange tokens. Three interesting omissions from the index are FTX’s own exchange token FTT, BitMAX’s token BTMX, and Kucoin’s KuCoin shares. FTX however have said they are open to changing their indexes as they progress to find the right combination.

Crypto derivatives have seen exponential growth over the past two years. BitMEX still leads the charge. However many newly founded exchanges such as FTX and now BTSE Exchange are hot on their heels attempting to absorb market share. Each exchange has its own value proposition, it’s own selling point. So what is BTSE’s selling point? Let’s find out.

BTSE was founded back in 2018 with its markets officially launching this year. It is under regulations of the Central Bank of United Arab Emirates. The team hails from a strong combination of traditional financial and software backgrounds. Coming from giants like Goldman Sachs, IBM and Cisco.

Our ethos is to tailor BTSE towards fulfilling the needs of professional traders and institutional investors by providing usability and reliability on a platform with high liquidity and fast settlement, all in a trusted environment.

Futures 2.0

BTSE’s standout feature is what they like to describe as “Futures 2.0”. On traditional crypto derivative exchanges all trading is done through Bitcoin. Whether that be posting margin or settlement (closing positions). Futures 2.0 allows users to post margin and settle their trades in either a selection of cryptocurrencies or traditional FIAT currencies. Users can post margin with multiple currencies and coins simultaneously. With the ability to easily add and remove multiple collateralized assets on the fly.

Spot Markets

Another item unique to BTSE is that they offer traditional spot markets. Users can deposit dollars from their bank account and buy Bitcoin or sell their Bitcoin for dollars. With previous derivatives exchanges this was not possible. It was Bitcoin exclusively. BTSE is also loyal to the cyberpunk philosophy surrounding cryptocurrency even though they offer FIAT deposits and withdrawals KYC is completely optional as long as you stick to cryptocurrency settlement and margin.

Liquidity

Liquidity is what makes or breaks an exchange. A new exchanges primary motive should be generating liquidity. An exchange which can not generate liquidity will not attract users to trade there. BTSE tackles this problem in a number of ways. The most exciting of which being its shared liquidity pool. BTSE’s all-in-one order book allows all users to share the same liquidity pool via ONE order book, regardless of currencies. BTSE has also tried to on board new users with promotions such as fee rebates and deposit bonuses. At the time of writing on a non volatile Sunday market BTSE has reported 37 million dollars in transaction volume on its Bitcoin pairs. Which is very good for a brand new exchange. However, they will need to keep the ball rolling in order to keep up with the competition.

Security and Network

BTSE employs industry standard security techniques such as 2FA and cold wallet storage. From a networking standpoint their exchange is secure as well. BTSE hosts their own servers so there is no reliance on company’s like Google or Amazon to provide hosting. Which has caused problems for exchanges in the past. For example, when Amazon Web Services went down temporarily an exchange called BitMAX had huge problems when a number of their coins lost 99% of their value due to data errors. Many exchanges also have to go through temporary outages in order to update and upgrade their systems. BTSE uses something known as ‘horizontal scaling’ which prevents this.

BTSE has the “typical” 100x leverage. With 5 main trading pairs Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and Tether. All 5 having a futures and USD pairing.

Conclusion

In summary, BTSE Exchange is not revolutionizing cryptocurrency trading. However they are an improvement on whats already there. Whether these improvements can it lead to becoming one of the top exchanges is not for me to decide. But if their dedicated team can keep improving I do not see why not.

Note: Though we are using Bitcoin for simplicity in this article the same futures arbitrage method can be applied on any asset which has futures contracts available. Such as Altcoins, Gold, Oil, and Currencies among others.

At the time of writing this Bitcoin is at a crossroads for traders. Hovering just above 10000$. It might as well be up to a coin toss whether we continue upwards or head lower. Volatility is nearing lows, and low volatility always precedes high volatility. Essentially, there is a large price move incoming but we do not know which way.

Now how do we trade such a scenario? Do we take a side and pray that its right? Risking price moving sharply against us. Do we sell all or coins in hopes we buy them back lower. The opportunity cost being that you lose out if price rises sharply. You could do either of these and bet right and make money or you could lose. We need to find a happy medium between these two. One where our risk to the upside or downside is neutral yet we can still profit off volatility. This is where Futures arbitrage steps in.

Before we get into the actual method for futures arbitrage we will first run through some basic terms and what you will need to carry it out. Firstly you will need to sign up for an exchange that has the ability to short Bitcoin and has futures contracts. We recommend either BitMEX or FTX however there is an ample supply of them so use whatever exchange you feel comfortable with.

The term quantitative trading strikes fear into the heart of many a trader. Quantitative trading firms are almost seem as the boogeymen of the trading world. They are rather sarcastically blamed for being the people to blame when you lose a trade or get stopped out. This reputation is partially due to the air of mystique surrounding quantitative trading. A lot of their operations are rather secretive and only insiders are aware of them. So, this bring us to the question; Alameda Research, who are they? And what do they do?

A lot of people first encounter the name Alameda Research when scrolling through the rather infamous BitMEX leaderboard. Currently they hold 2 spots. Netting over 7000BTC in profit. And this is just from accounts they have chosen to display. Alameda in recent times have been starting to give insight not only into how a quantitative trading firm operates, but also the new found institutional presence in the cryptocurrency industry.

The Birth of Alameda Research

Alameda was first founded during the famous bull run of 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. Sam previously worked for Jane Street. A quantitative trading firm on Wall Street. While Gary previously worked for Google as a software engineer.

They currently manage over 100 million dollars in assets. Trading between 600 million and 1.2 billion dollars everyday across a variety of crypto assets such as spot Bitcoin, altcoins and crypto derivatives. Making them one of the largest liquidity providers in the cryptocurrency industry.

Alameda makes the majority of its money from quantitative trading. However they have diversified into other areas such as creating their own over the counter trading desk and recently launching their own exchange FTX.

The CEO Sam Bankman-Fried goes into detail on how he got started in the cryptocurrency industry in an insightful interview with Venture Coinist.

The first thing that struck me was just how inefficient it (referring to the cryptocurrency industry) was

Interview with Venture Coinist

Quantitative Trading

To understand what he means by this this we must first understand a key component of quantitative trading. Market inefficiencies. Market inefficiencies can be very loosely defined as a situation where the current prices do not reflect all the publicly available demand and supply information, due to negligence or breakdown of buyer-seller communications.

This is best shown in terms of crypto by means of an example. In the run up to the Bitcoin bullrun top of 20000$ there were incredibly large price discrepancies between exchanges. One exchange may have quoted 19000$ per BTC while on another exchange 16000$ per BTC was quoted. If one were to short Bitcoin on the exchange quoting the price of 19000$ and buy Bitcoin on the exchange quoting 16000$ one could make a profit of 3000$ (19000$ – 16000$ = 3000$) risk free. This is one among many examples of a market inefficiency commonly known as arbitraging.

Alameda exploits inefficiencies similar to this on a daily basis (Though not as extreme). Alameda recently uploaded a video to their YouTube channel from a live trading session in which they talked through how they traded a large seller on Binance who created a 2% price discrepancy across exchanges. Creating a perfect arbitrage opportunity.

Alameda also engages in the nitty-gritty of what quantitative trading is most known for. Its large programming and mathematical basis for trading. Alameda like most other firms is quite secretive in regards to these quantitative models. Divulging very little details on how they are formulated. On their website they are intentionally vague simply state they employ “medium term quantitative strategies” such as “mean reversion” and “machine learning”. These terms reveal practically nothing.

However, who can blame them for being secretive? Quantitative models can make millions of dollars. But if the strategy’s leave the four walls of the trading firm the models become null and void, and practically worthless. Secrecy is an essential element of these models.

The Challenges Presented by Cryptocurrency Infrastructure

In Sam’s interview with Venture Coinist he also goes in depth on how cryptocurrency infrastructure as a whole presents challenges to quantitative firms due to its decentralized nature.

One of the key pieces there that makes these sort of opportunities exist but hard to take advantage of is in Finance its not that you can move Apple stock from one exchange to another instantly. It’s that you don’t have to because you just have centralized clearing firms.

Interview with Venture Coinist

Later in the interview he also discusses how the variance in exchanges and lack of co-ordination and standardization between them opens up quite a few problems for Alameda.

For example, one exchange may have a completely different way of interacting with trading programs (Through API’s) than another. While some may be limited in what they can do at all. Not only does he criticize exchanges and their API set-up but also their infrastructure as a whole. Making reference to the infamous order submission errors which are common on BitMEX which prevents trades going through. But also mentioning poor quality exchange matching engines, as well as the way bankruptcy’s are handled while on margin.

The Creation of the FTX Exchange

These issues are what motivated the team at Alameda to create their own exchange called FTX. Which they feel is done the right way for all party’s.

FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange built by traders, for traders. We strive to build a platform powerful enough for professional trading firms and intuitive enough for first-time users.

FTX.com

FTX has put a lot of time and effort into developing infrastructure so they don’t suffer the same problems like the ones highlighted previously. They have developed a more advanced liquidation engine to prevent claw backs, as well as working on platform stability and there matching engine.

Not only has FTX worked on doing the basics well they are also the exchange that is leading the way in terms of product innovation. From the launch of the exchange FTX has listed a whole host of new trading products. These include brand new leveraged tokens, perpetuals swap contracts on a range of coins, new tradeable indices such as altcoin indices, and a privacy coin index among others. These allow you to trade the altcoin or privacy coin market as a whole. FTX has also joined the list of cryptocurrency exchanges to offer options trading.

FTX has also worked on creating brand new features. These include things like Quant Zone which allow users to create their own quantitative trading programs, and a variety of trading competitions for traders to take part in.

Conclusion

In conclusion I feel that as a whole Alameda Research represent a rather changing cryptocurrency space. Their presence as a whole may be a net benefit. Increasing liquidity and market efficiency are good for the space and will further drive an increase of institutional on boarding. Although many retail traders may feel justifiably put off and even fearful by the ever many might see it as a necessary step forward.

In the past few years I have researched and scrutinized quite a few altcoins. I have seen excellent projects with incredibly unique and interesting ideas with some amazingly talented teams. However none have given off the same aura as NYZO. There has been a lot of hype surrounding NYZO in niche crypto communities. But does it live up to the hype? Here is our NYZO altcoin review.

To give you some background. The project was founded back on the second of April 2018 by a team of anonymous developers. These developers silently worked away on the project in the background. Without a single piece of advertisement or promotion. No marketing teams, no PR agencies. Eventually through word of mouth the project began to spread to a small niche of people within the crypto sphere. This diffusion of information is by no means an accident either. People are genuinely excited about this projects new take on blockchain technology, and the future potential of it.

Technology

Bitcoin brought us Proof of Work (mining) back in 2008. Peercoin brought us Proof of Stake back in 2013. A few months later we got Masternodes. Then we had hybrids of all three. Then finally we had DAGs. This is where NYZO turns a new page in our story with the invention of Proof of Diversity. Proof of Diversity uses a collaborative verification system that requires neither proof of work nor proof of stake. NYZO is built on the idea of the mesh. The mesh is simply a network of computers known as verifiyers all running NYZO and communicating information to each other. In return for securing the mesh these computers are given a 10% reward of transaction fees for each block they secure as well as the following 9 blocks. The great thing about the mesh is that unlike other consensus mechanisms it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on mining equipment. If you wanted to you could set up a NYZO node on a simple VPS or even your own home computer (This is however not recommended) and have it up and running within an hour.

Proof of Diversity

This brings us on to another crucial element of Proof of Diversity. NYZO is not secured by raw hash or computing power, but rather by time and probability. In order to join the mesh one must wait in line. Every second you wait in line your probability of joining the mesh and earning rewards increases. You would be right to ask the question of why there is this queue to join the mesh? Is that not counter-intuitive? The queue itself is where the security of NYZO lies. In order to attack the network a bad actor must control more than 50% of the verifiers. The queue through time and probability prevents someone from deploying 50% of nodes instantly onto the mesh. At the time of writing there are currently 6872 nodes waiting to join the network with 1227 currently in the mesh. For each verifier that joins the network its security increases. The downside to the vast number of verifiers in the queue is how long it takes to join. Right now it could take many months to join the mesh and earn NYZO. However that is the opportunity cost of network security. Whether that investment is worth it is completely up to you.

The security and efficiency of the network is also maintained through radical democracy. If there is an under performing verifier who for whatever reason is slowing down the network other verifiers can vote them out of the mesh. They are then replaced by a new verifier who joins from the queue. This is why I recommended earlier not to run your verifier on a home computer. Network performance is essential to ensure that you stay in the mesh. The network is ruthless. If your verifier is substandard it will be removed and be sent to the back of the queue. We recommend using Vultr if you are looking to host a verifier.

Community

NYZO is an open source project. Anyone can contribute to their codebase on their Github. Their is also a large community run Discord server which currently has over 1100 members who are constantly discussing NYZO and cryptocurrency in general as well as providing tech support to those who are encountering issues.

The NYZO developers have previously said that they will at some point leave the project entirely in the community’s hands. There was an air of contention within the community up until recently. The developers do hold a large premine of coins and there was uncertainty surrounding what these coins would be used for. However the NYZO developers came up with a unique an interesting strategy to deal with this large premine and put nerves at ease. Half of the premine will be locked up and purely used to incentivize developers for building on the NYZO blockchain as well as rewarding developers who responsibly disclose bugs and potential vulnerabilities with the chain. The other half will remain in the hands of the developers. However, the coins locked in developer wallets will only be released as NYZOs blockchain grows in transaction volume. This essentially incentivizes and rewards the NYZO developers to continue to develop and better NYZO.

The Future of the Project

NYZO does not have a typical roadmap like other altcoins. There is no graphic showing what the developers plan for the project 3 months down the line or 2 years down the line. The developers are focused on purely making NYZO the best it can be. They concentrate their attention on bug fixes and ensuring protocol stability. The only current tasks on their roadmap are to create a basic general software client that provides basic functions such as transaction creation and submission, balance lookup, and transaction history lookup and improving the resilience and recovery speed of verifiers.

In conclusion I am very optimistic about the future of NYZO. It is one of the most innovative projects I have seen in quite a while. The developers are incredibly hardworking and though they hide behind the veil of anonymity they are transparent about what their goals are. The good vastly outweighs any issues I have with the project. There will be stumbling blocks along the way for NYZO, the same as every other coin. But if the community can rally behind the coin and the developers I forsee positive things.

Buying NYZO

If you do not want to set up a verifier you can alternatively buy it on qTrade.io this is currently the only trustworthy exchange which has a NYZO market. You can read our full review of qTrade here.

About

qTrade was founded back in April of 2018. Based out of the United States of America. Though the exchange was only founded in 2018, the team has been involved in the cryptocurrency industry for a number of years. In 2014 they created a profit switching mining pool, later expanding their technology to carry out currency arbitration and conversion for miners. Their teams base in the grassroots stage of crypto shows in qTrades overarching ideology. Their manifesto is very simple: To accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology around the world by reducing the barriers faced by innovative, new, and emerging technology. But can it live up to its promises? This is our qTrade.io Review.

What Differentiates qTrade From The Competition?

qTrade prides themselves on their support of new and emerging projects. qTrade wants to encourage the development of projects built from the ground up by. They do this by creating some of the cheapest listing fees in crypto. Binance, the largest altcoin exchange was quoted giving out a listing fee figure of 400BTC. This parasitic fee is obviously way out of the reach of smaller projects where every penny needs to be put into development. Without qTrade, coins like NYZO which we have previously overwhelmingly positively reviewed may never gain traction, even if there technology is world class. Instead being replaced by projects with deep pockets and large corporate financial backing, and as we have seen in the past with crypto, these deep pockets do not necessarily translate into quality projects.

The fee for listing on qTrade can vary from from zero to 2BTC this is obviously a lot more competitive than their larger exchange counterparts. This gives smaller projects room to breath. The listing fee is based off a number of basic and preferred criteria. The full list can be found here. But, to summarize. qTrade rewards projects which are original, have new technology, dedicated development teams, and active communities. By having more of these attributes the listing fee goes down. qTrade also frowns upon projects which have large premines or ICOs and takes these factors into account when deciding the listing fee. They also put an element of control into the users hands by allowing them to vote on which coins they want listed. The vote does not guarantee listing but rather shows the team at qTrade which coins people want listed.

Security

One of the fundamental questions one must answer when it comes to an exchange is its security. qTrade employs rigorous security techniques and technology. They build their own transactions to allow for easy off-site signing, ensure idempotency, and leverage cold wallet storage for additional safety. On the user side qTrade has the industry standard support for two factor authentication allowing users to add additional security to their account.

Fees

qTrades fee schedule is interesting for a smaller exchange. They offer a maker fee (adding liquidity to the orders) of 0% and a taker fee (taking away liquidity from the orders) of anywhere between 0.5% and 1.5% depending on the asset. A maker fee of 0% essentially means that you can trade for free if you use limit orders. While the high taker fee penalizes people who use market orders and take liquidity from the orderbook. This is overall a good strategy on behalf of qTrade to generate consistent liquidity. One of the problems facing all smaller exchanges. I would suspect qTrade will begin to move their fees towards a more common structure such as the flat 0.1% Binance employs as the exchange grows in size and liquidity.

qTrades withdraw fees are competitive when compared to their much larger competitors even while lacking the economies of scale.

Regulation

qTrade is based out of the U.S which has perhaps the most stringent regulatory framework when it comes to crypto. However, there still remains a large grey area within the U.S jurisdiction. qTrade has gone on record and stated that they are committed to complying with all current and future regulatory law. They have demonstrated their willingness to comply by refusing to list coins which could be deemed as securities under the Howey Test. However, I do feel that being subject to U.S regulation is something that will hold qTrade back. We have seen the flight of volume away from American altcoin exchanges like Poloniex and Bittrex, towards exchanges like Binance and Huobi who are regulated in much more lazes-faire jurisdictions.

Conclusion

I am optimistic about the future of qTrade and I truly wish for their future success. They are shying away from the predatory corporatism which is rife in the cryptocurrency industry in favor of a more grassroots approach. Something cryptocurrency was founded on. There are a number of issues with qTrade but they are all things that can be overcome, and if they continue on the path they are I have no doubt that they will.