Last week the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, announced the launch of two futures testnet platforms – but not everyone is impressed.

The launch of the testnets was intended to familiarize test participants with the products and offerings before the final launch.

Additionally, participants can enter to win up to 10,000 BNB in prizes for testing the platforms and casting their vote for the winner.

A Twitter user and an early tester of both platforms, ‘doublejump’ (@2xjump), gave a detailed account of his experience in a series of tweets.

Doublejump opined that he did not like either platform and that they were not yet ready to be used.

Currently @binance is running a testnet for two proposed futures exchange platforms. Futures platform A was seemingly developed in-house, platform B was developed by the recently acquired JEX exchange. I didn't really like either one. Some of my thoughts in this thread. 1/13 — doublejump (@2xjump) September 6, 2019

While platform A is created by Binance’s own development team, platform B was developed by cryptocurrency derivatives platform JEX, which Binance recently acquired.

Binance mirrors BitMEX

Doublejump explained that platform A had most of its mechanics similar to BitMEX’s, which included “funding every 8 hours, insurance fund funded by liquidations, and auto-deleveraging in case of insufficient insurance funds.”

Additionally, both versions of the platform offer a perpetual BTC/USDT swap, similar to the XBT/USD inverse perpetual swap offered by BitMEX.

The similarities appear to go beyond features, however, as Binance caught flak recently for plagiarizing BitMEX’s Futures documentation.

Congrats on the Testnet Futures launches @binance. Glad to see you enjoyed reading our documentation as much as we enjoyed writing it! pic.twitter.com/lLzcLcX6t4 — BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) September 4, 2019

“Congrats on the Testnet Futures launches @binance,” BitMEX tweeted, “Glad to see you enjoyed reading our documentation as much as we enjoyed writing it!”

Similarities aside, doublejump admitted that Binance’s futures platforms are better than BitMEX in terms of liquidation.

While Binance charges a 0.5% fee for the insurance fund, BitMEX directs all the remaining funds after liquidation towards insurance.

Bitfinex, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Bittrex, and HitBTC will be used as a reference for BTC’s rates on platform A.

To this, the tester expressed his lack of confidence in the exchanges chosen, calling HitBTC “shady” and snarkily noting, “I guess 6 exchanges is a lot to manipulate at once though.”

Final verdict

Summarizing the experience, the tester was of the opinion that platform A is “unusable” and said platform B was “not documented well”.

“Platform A is unusable because of its contract size granularity but does have a nice interface and decent specifications otherwise. Platform B is not documented well and has an unwieldy leverage system.

Platform A allows 20x leverage, while platform B enables up to 100x leverage.

Binance’s testing of its futures contract platforms comes ahead of Bakkt exchange’s launch of physically-settled Bitcoin futures on September 23.

After a not-so-good start with BitMEX, Binance could have a tough road ahead with Bakkt as a competition.