Gemini, a New York-based bitcoin exchange led by Winklevoss brothers, has announced first-ever daily bitcoin auction that is live for trading.



According to the official blog post, 2,104 BTC was traded at $593.67 in the company’s first daily BTC/USD auction. These daily auctions are universally implemented by traditional asset exchanges including New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, and Bats. These auctions will increase price discovery and transparency and reduce the costs across the board by ensuring that both buyers and sellers do not miss each other during the trading day.



"It's the first ever end-of-day auction on a bitcoin exchange. It's a pretty standard feature on traditional exchanges that didn't exist on a bitcoin exchange until now," Tyler Winklevoss, Co-Founder of Gemini told CoinDesk.com.



Apart from this, the auction will bring customers, the benefits of over-the-counter (OTC) trading without the overhead, hassle, and lack of transparency of trading venues. The company will first support only the BTC/USD trading pair, but plans to open it for all our trading pairs in the coming weeks.



The auction will provide key benefits to the Gemini customers including lower fees, market-to-market benchmark price, instant settlements, no counterparty risks, among others. The company’s next BTC/USD auction will occur at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time today.



In order to participate in the auction, customers can enter Auction-Only Market and Auction-Only Limit Orders to buy or to sell beginning at 5:00 p.m. ET the prior day until 4:00 p.m ET for that day’s Auction. Beginning at 3:50 p.m. ET each day, indicative auction prices are calculated every minute until 3:59 p.m and are broadcast via both our market data API and our website frontend.



Earlier in July, the company announced a new partnership and sponsorship deal with professional eSports organization Echo Fox to bring together the cryptocurrency market and eSports – an industry that has been growing at a rapid pace across the globe.