Phemex — a new crypto derivatives trading company launched in Singapore is looking to bring institutional-grade derivatives trading to the crypto space. Led by a team with a vast Wall Street trading experience, Phemex joins an expanding pool of crypto derivative brokers establishing a presence in Singapore.

Meanwhile, regulators in the country are reportedly looking towards the crypto derivatives scene as interest in the market continues to gather steam. Across the globe, 2019 has seen the emergence of a plethora of virtual currency derivatives trading options.

Bringing Institutional-grade Derivatives Trading to the Crypto Space

According to Jack Tao, CEO of Phemex, the company is bringing a plethora of unique features to its crypto derivatives trading platform that will set it apart from the other participants in the market. In an email to Blockonomi, Tao remarked:

“We built Phemex to sustain peak trading volumes: our engine allows 300k transactions per second and provide incredible availability. We set standards of security that are also above the industry’s average, we built our own Hierarchical Deterministic Cold Wallet System, which assigns an independent deposit address to each user. And finally, we offer advanced functionalities that are not common across the industry yet: sub-accounts, L3 market data, and much more.”

Phemex’s crypto derivatives trading has been in the beta testing stage for a few weeks with trading beginning at the back end of November 2019. According to Tao, the platform has a transaction speed of 300,000 transactions per second (tx/s) with an order entry and response rate of under 1 millisecond.

The Phemex crypto derivates trading platform offers users the opportunity to trade Bitcoin (BTC), XRP, EOS, Litecoin (LTC) and Ether (ETH) perpetual contracts with leverage of up to 100x. Currently, the platform has an average turnover of about 1,000 BTC on its BTC/USD perpetual contracts.

The Phemex CEO says the company boasts a wealth of talent with vast experience in the financial markets. Tao himself, a Wall Street veteran with more than a decade with Morgan Stanley. The Phemex team also includes eight other former Morgan Stanley executives as well as dozens of senior developers.

Crypto Derivatives Trading Exploded in 2019

Phemex’s entry into the crypto derivatives scene marks another expansion of the growing market. As previously reported by Blockonomi, crypto derivatives trading has experienced a boom in 2019 with many new entrants into the market.

This growth in the virtual currency derivatives market has seen some commentators stating that the trend could enhance the financialization of the crypto industry as a whole. For Tao, there is a growing positive sentiment around virtual currency derivatives, stating:

“We received a lot of interest from institutional investors located all over the world. Most of them are confident that new regulations will soon make this type of collaborations possible.”

Singapore Looking at Cryptocurrency Derivatives Market Regulation

Concerning regulations, authorities in Singapore are moving towards concrete plans to formalize crypto derivatives trading in the country. Back in November, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that it was planning to create a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency derivatives trading.

A regulated virtual currency derivatives framework would signal another example of Singapore’s willingness to allow cryptos to thrive in the country. In recent times, several Southeast Asian nations have proposed policies aimed at improving the regulatory climate for virtual assets.

Singapore’s approach appears dissimilar to that expected of authorities in the U.K. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is reportedly set to ban crypto derivatives trading citing risks posed by the market. Many stakeholders have urged the FCA to reconsider with the U.K. government saying it has no plans to interfere with the regulator’s decision.