It was announced from bitcoin derivatives exchange Deribit that yesterday they deployed the first version of its new portfolio margin feature. The feature was first announced back in March.
Further, the company stated that portfolio margin will only be given to traders who demonstrate proper knowledge about options trading and who understand the concept of portfolio margin. Also, a minimum deposit of 3 BTC is initially required for activation.
What is Portfolio Margin (in a nutshell)?
It’s a different way of calculating maintenance margin. A (continuous) stress test is done on positions to calculate maximum potential loss over a 17.5% movement in the bitcoin price, either up or down. Also, open orders under portfolio margin rules do not require initial margin, giving way to any trader to make markets in options with limited capital.
Alt-exchange
The team says it’s not a secret anymore that they’ve been developing an altcoin exchange behind the scenes. The company has already spoken with market makers and shortly will be ready to provide healthy markets with low fees. Deribit says to expect this to launch sometime after summer. That will also be the time Deribit implements Byteball and Stellar wallets and markets.
Derbit also provided the following notice of exchange rules due to changes to the Bitcoin protocol and the possibility of a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain:
Deposits & network confirmations – increased the number of confirmations needed before a deposit is credited to accounts. As of now, Deribit will change this from 1 to 6 confirmations. Please note that this could increase later on.
Suspending withdrawals – as of the 31st of June 12.00 UTC, will temporarily suspend all withdrawals until the network is stable again.
What about forks? – ViaBTC announced that starting from the 1st of August they will fork with Bitcoin ABC. If this happens Deribit says they will support it so users can withdraw BCC (Bitcoin Cash) as well. We aim to support forks as we believe these “coins” belong to our users. We will use the users Cash Balances for this as of the time of an eventual split.
Future trading and options trading w/ BTC Index calculation – if a fork happens Deribit will calculate the index as if it were 2 (or more) coins: Index = average price of “Bitcoin 1” + average price of “Bitcoin 2” (etc).
If a chain split happens, the value of the fork will not be immediately added to the Deribit Bitcoin Index calculation. Traders should be aware of this. It might take even a few days before there is an updated index to reflect the new fork in the index.
For any new contracts created after any fork, Deribit would clearly state if the contract is a single chain or a combination of bitcoins.