Even though I was unable to find time to travel all the way to the U.S., I had the pleasure of watching Coinsummit’s live stream. Though the conference was focused on panels, there were a few company presentations. Only a couple really caught my attention in any meaningful way. One of these was Atlas ATS.

Their new platform, Atlas 2.0, is a Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol digital asset exchange claiming to be the first to announce options on Bitcoin. The exchange platform is ‘Wall Street grade’, and, besides options, it brings a high level of sophistication: trading major alt-coins, an array of advanced native order types for FIX API clients, derivative products, multi-sig transaction wallet, and a larger selection of advanced order types for clients using the FIX interface.

The Atlas 2.0 platform has been launched in Hong Kong and North America, where it has established the digital currency exchanges. The company is keen for the market to know that it has been deployed on a global, secure, and high precision private network. This network is exclusively managed under the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), a division of Perseus Telecom.

Perseus is a private global high precision network provider for financial trading, gaming, e-commerce and multi-media. Customers include top tier market makers, banks, exchanges and Fortune 500 companies.

Perseus makes connecting to Atlas ATS simple, through a physical connection at any global location. Dr. Jock Percy, Chief Executive of Perseus, says they are “pleased to respond in tandem with Atlas ATS to the strong demand for diversified digital currency trading products accessible from any data centre in the world.”

He goes on to add that “Both companies are truly able to translate real asset class risk, reliability and latency concerns and to utilize this expert knowledge for the digital currency trading ecosystem.”

Shawn Sloves, Chief Executive at Atlas ATS notes that “Atlas ATS is pleased to expand (their) product offering to Options for our sophisticated global trading market participants.” He goes on to note that the company now offers “two types of option contracts, ‘Calls’ and ‘Puts’, which confer upon the owner the right to buy and sell, respectively, the underlying crypto-currency at a set ‘strike’ price on a given ‘expiration’ date.”

The absence of options trading for cryptocurrency is often lamented. Let’s hope this company can live up to its promise and deliver a viable platform. It would benefit the ecosystem greatly.

Atlas 2.0 supports three major alt-coins providing more products to trade and digital currency options for Bitcoin and Litecoin. Fees on options trades follow the maker/taker model. The rebate earned when adding liquidity is 0.1 and the fee for removing liquidity is 0.3. Advanced order types are available via FIX API.

The platform supports trailing stop, stop limit, market, reserves, discretionary, and mid-point peg orders. Additional order types will be made available to website and Web API users in the next major platform upgrade.

Most importantly, the platform provides a new multi-sig wallet service for Improved Security. This multi-sig, read-only wallet with cold storage, is coin agnostic, supporting over 180 alt-coins.

The company will be adding additional alt coins over the next few weeks. They will also be expediting payment and banking services to create more options for funding trading accounts.

Atlas seems dedicated to providing a secure, state-of-the-art technology exchange platform for transacting digital currency. The services they promise to deliver, embarrassingly absent from the space until now, are exciting.

The company clearly has visions of being an industry leader in operating a trading venue and providing innovative products and services. If they are successful the benefit to the global trading community would be immense.

Competition from technology-driven markets increases overall market volumes and improves performance, providing benefits to all participants.