Tag: Binance

Binance the exchange founded in 2017 has today gave a quick glimpse of their plans to launch options trading on the platform.

A tweet made by the official Binance Twitter account today shows a picture of what appears to be patch notes of a future update. Within the patch notes support for options trading is mentioned.

Binance CEO ‘CZ’ also posted a screenshot from the Binance mobile app with an options trading tab shown.

With this prospective launch Binance will join a handful of other crypto exchanges to launch options trading such as Deribit and FTX.

Some have however pointed out a hypocrisy within this future launch. Only recently Binance made the decision to delist a number of leveraged tokens. These leveraged tokens were created and popularized by previously mentioned exchange FTX. These leveraged tokens would allow users to gain leverage on a number of coins so a 1% gain in a certain altcoin would increase the value of the altcoin by up to 10%. The same was true of losses however.

Binance undertook the decision to remove these tokens citing that they were too risky, and that FTX had not created enough informational material for Binance users.

The decision to remove leveraged tokens contradicts the launch of options trading which are a much more complex and risky financial instrument.

Binance came under scrutiny yesterday after a small number of Twitter users pointed out strange price behavior just before Ravencoin was listed for margin trading.

The controversy arose from what appears to be some form of insider trading.

At approximately 05.30 UTC time Ravencoin had a considerable price surge of close to 13% in 2 hours. Two hours later at 07:30 Binance announced via their official Twitter and Blog that Ravencoin will be added to their list of margin assets. The price chart below sums it up well.

Being added to the list of margin assets on Binance allows traders to use leverage to long or short Ravencoin.

The price surge before the announcement was even made lead some people to believe insider trading had occurred. Either with internal Binance staff themselves, or that the information was leaked to individuals outside of Binance early.

This is not the first time exchanges have been accused of insider trading. The most notable example was back in 2018 when Coinbase was accused of insider trading surrounding Bitcoin Cash.