Bitcoin derivatives exchange Deribit completes major system update

Last week, bitcoin futures and options exchange Deribit completed a system update with a variety of technology upgrades along with some new exchange terms. The scheduled down time was for only 20 minutes at 11:00 UTC on March 20th.

The most notable changes see the introduction of extra transaction fees for liquidations, new initial and maintenance margin requirements, increase of maximum leverage, the introduction of market orders, and the increase of minimum tick size. See below for detailed information on the updates done to the platform.

Most notable changes:

1. Extra transaction fees for liquidations of 0.1% for futures and 0.001 BTC for options on top of standard fees. Those extra fees will be the income for the insurance fund.
2. New initial & maintenance margins for futures – higher leverage for smaller positions, starting at 2% maintenance margin / 3% initial margin and linearly increasing with 0.5% per 100 BTC position. After deployment the intention is to bring maintenance margin further down, so that maximum leverage will become x50 soon as opposed to x20 today. After deployment the maximum leverage will be x40 (2.5% initial margin). Margin slowly increases linearly as position increases with 0.5% / 100 BTC.
3. New order type: Market orders.
4. Increase of minimum tick size for futures from $0.01 to $0.1.

Other important changes:

1. More advanced futures mark price calculation where the mark price is Index Price + 30 seconds EMA of spread between Index and market price (last traded price).
2. Warning popup for any orders transmitted with abnormal prices which should reduce the chance of doing any undesired trades.
3. Added date/time range selector for Transaction Log.
4. Added possibility to download filtered Transaction Log in .CSV format.
5. Options order form – added ability to show full trade history via infinity scroll.
6. API – ‘cancel all’ now accepts optional instrument name allowing to cancel all orders in single instrument.
7. In options order book the places where user has opened orders are emphasized (if best bid and/or best ask).
8. Updated trading view charts component.
9. Optimized speed of add/edit/cancel (all) operations, specifically noticeable to API users.
10. When placing a futures order with price exceeding minimum sell or maximum buy price its price is automatically corrected to max/min price instead of rejecting the order.
11. All historical announcements are now available through “Get older announcements” button in announcements popup.
12. Added commissions statistics to user’s statistics page, also added yearly stats and year to date stats.
13. Liquidation orders clearly visible in orders history tab marked as type “Liquidation”
14. Historical Volatility page changed where calculation of historical volatility is done by measuring index price every hour instead of daily over a 15 days period.
15. Added limits for number of open orders per instrument and maximum size of open futures position for users. New default limits are maximum 100 orders per instrument with a total maximum of orders per account of 1000. Maximum open futures position size limit: 500.000 contracts. Both limits can be increased or decreased any moment at the discretion of Deribit Risk Management. Though no positions will be forced to close due to such changes.
16. New more advanced liquidation algorithms.
17. Fixed rounding problems for futures.
18. Liquidation fees are transferred to insurance fund (once per hour by default).
19. More advanced Portfolio Margin calculations (changes should be hardly noticeable and will not affect traders in disruptive way).
20. WebSocket pongs handled properly.
21. Memory and CPU usage improvements (e.g. platform starts twice faster and consumes twice less CPU when idle).
22. Added changes in matching engine preparing for Deribit nodes and incremental updates.
23. Higher margin requirements for ITM puts with a price higher than 1 BTC for non-PM accounts. Only put options with a price higher than 1 BTC are affected. New maintenance margin= 0.09 * Mark Price + Mark price.
24. Various API fixes, specifically for FIX users.
25. Various other small fixes.