For a while now BitMEX has been the sole player in the crypto margin exchange space offering BTCUSD spot trading, BTC Futures, as well multiple Altcoin Futures contracts. At the time of writing this BitMEX has traded 2billion$ on the day, Purely on its BTCUSD pair making it by far the most liquid Bitcoin Exchange. This has lead to a sort of arrogance from BitMEX, users are complaining about multiple issues on the platform such as the infamous order submission errors and exchange downtime. Which caused a huge short squeeze a number of weeks ago. Leaving users frustrated and ostracized and looking for an exchange to call home. Dominance tends to lead to incompetence and in steps our knight in shining armor Deribit to save us from our tyrannous overlords known as BitMEX. But can they slay the evil dragon and return Tamriel to its rightful owners? (The Nords) Lets investigate.

The first thing we must look at is liquidity. You could have the greatest trading platform ever with a trading engine that can handle 2 bazillion orders a second but its an exercise in futility if there is no liquidity. As previously mentioned BitMEX has done over 2 billion$ in trade volume as I am writing. Deribit has done 6814BTC in trade volume today, the dollar conversion is around 43,759,864 USD. Clearly BitMEX is the more liquid exchange by a fair margin. So if you’re trading big sizes BitMEX is still your daddy, but if you’re trading less than 500k in size you are probably good. Both exchanges are indexed linked to spot prices BitMEX being the average of Bitstamp and GDAX. While Deribit takes 6 exchanges Bitfinex, Bitstamp, GDAX, Gemini, Itbit, and Kraken. Takes the two exchanges with the highest and lowest prices and removes them from the average. Then averages the remaining 4. This is probably more secure than BitMEX as if in the unlikely event GDAX and Bitstamp went offline BitMEX would have to close the market. Both exchanges base funding rates off these indexes to ensure the price is tied to the underlying asset and there is minimal variance.

Deribit Index

Fees are similar on both platforms, if you add liquidity to the book (place a limit order) on both platforms you receive 0.025% in rebate. However if you take liquidity from the book (market order) you are charged 0.05% on Deribit and 0.075% on BitMEX. Making Deribit 0.025% cheaper. Deribit however also has options trading, which will be discussed further in a few mousewheel scrolls. The fees on an option contract are 0.0004 BTC per option contract.

Deribit Fees

An options contract is an agreement between two parties to facilitate a potential transaction on the underlying asset at a preset price, referred to as the strike price. The two types of contracts are put and call options. Call for long and put for short. The options on Deribit are ‘European Style’ options contracts meaning the option can only be exchanged for the underlying asset at expiration. There are a number of options on the platform available, from contracts with strikes of 30000$ on the 28th of December or 2800$ by the 28th December. So choose your poison wisely. There are have been books wrote purely about option contracts things like Delta and Implied Volatility are pretty boring to read and write about so I’ll leave some resources below the article for further reading.

Deribit Options

In conclusion if you’re a big baller trading big sizes from your green lambo. You will probably have to put up with those pesky order submission errors and downtimes that could potentially liquidate you, in favor of that juicy juicy liquidity on BitMEX for the time being. However if you’re just ordinary Joe Soaps who goes to bed dreaming of lambos, yachts and perpetual swaps Deribit is a lot more reliable with their platform from a user experience point of view. Less downtime. Less order submission errors. More time to get liquidated or die trying. Thanks for reading :)

BitMEX: https://tinyurl.com/y7zkznmv

Deribit: https://tinyurl.com/y8kqgloo

Investopedia Options Contracts: https://tinyurl.com/yctfg26r

Wikipedia Options Contracts: https://tinyurl.com/yamgkkyz