The little red swiss army knife recognized as one of the best survival tools, wheresoever you find yourself in — from tropical jungle to arctic tundra. If you step on the way of trading cryptocurrencies, surrounding landscape will be full of surprises, and such survival tool will be very helpful.

A trading terminal is an integrated set of tools required to do all everyday tasks achieving your goals — exactly like red swiss army knife helps the survivor to get out from the wilderness. In general, terminal software must allow put and manage trade sell/buy orders, perform technical analysis, deposit/withdraw funds and connect to exchanges or brokers.

How many crypto-traders are there in the world and what is the forecast for the growth of their numbers? In fact, it is impossible to determine exact statistics; the market is changing too much. But if you take into account such factors as:

· The current situation with the registration of new users on the main crypto-exchanges — up to 250,000 new users a day!

· The case with the dynamics of trading on the Forex market and the market of crypto-currencies (approximately -25% and +30% respectively)

It can be assumed that now there are several million crypto-traders and their number will increase many times as “classic” traders enter a new market.

Cryptocurrencies and exchanges: dimension of the problem

At first glance, trading crypto assets look like trading shares or foreign currencies. But don’t forget that in the crypto world even everyday things work another way — there are essential differences between terminals for trading cryptocurrency from a traditional exchange and forex terminals.

Perhaps, the most significant problem in trading cryptocurrencies (coins and ERC20 tokens) is their many-to-many relation between traded pairs and exchanges. In other words, any coin or token can be traded on many markets — with different price and conditions.

According to coinmarketcap.com, there are now 1515 cryptocurrencies (coins and tokens) traded on 8572 markets at 187 exchanges (as is February 7, 2018). A possible number of pairs exceeds 2.5 Million as every coin or token, in theory, can be traded against every other and every cryptocurrency against every fiat currency. In practice, we have a much smaller number of pairs — only ones that possess sufficient liquidity. The existence of about two hundred venues makes the picture so complicated.

Forex market looks more straightforward in comparison with crypto! From the practical point of view, such a significant dimension of the problem makes a single unified solution impossible — because we hardly can imagine one terminal connected to all exchanges, allowing to trade all crypto assets.

It means traders will face the need of choosing different terminals for working with various crypto-financial instruments. Even more: new assets go on to appear, but nobody knows on which exchange will be listed the token you want to buy or sell.

Types of terminal providers

Who can provide you a terminal for trading crypto assets?

· Cryptocurrency exchanges

· Independent developers

· Brokers

Of course, exchange must give access to its clients. So, all exchanges develop their own trading terminals, but they are rarely something outstanding. However, you can find some exceptions — for example, Kraken offers Cryptowatch charting and trading platform that considered very good and allows access to few exchanges, not only to Kraken itself.

As we mentioned above, the problem is in the large number of crypto-exchanges: if the trader uses original terminals for each venue, he will have to learn too many interfaces, but this is inefficient. It’s preferable to minimize the number of them. Therefore, independent developers have a chance.

Usually, d3rd party terminal developers try to establish a connection to as many exchanges as possible to make trader’s life more pleasant — and to gain better market share. Yes, that’s reasonable. In this case, a trader can focus all his attention on the market but not on the software features.

Unfortunately, an ideal picture doesn’t exist in reality, where trader has to work with many terminals. Crypto industry is too young, and that’s why there are no common standards like in banking, for instance. Anyway, the less is, the better — terminal that provides access to a more prominent list of sources will get a tremendous completive advantage.

Sooner or later the market will consolidate. But now, in the conditions of the “explosive” growth in the number of users, the number of exchanges will only grow.

How difficult is integration with exchanges, is it possible to unify it? BANKEX answer: this is one of the tasks that must be solved within the creating framework of a trading terminal system. Each exchange has its API, which differs both technologically (FIX, sockets, REST), and functional. Now we have developed a unified gateway architecture for exchanges and successfully expand it.

Traditional broker firms like XTRADE, e-Toro, etc. couldn’t stay aside from this extremely volatile and speculative crypto market.

Usability & functionality

Trader’s productivity depends on how good he can perceive market information presented through the terminal and how quickly and accurately use its functions. Shorter speaking, on terminal usability and UX. Remember swiss army knife again — it is a perfect combination of design and functionality that should be taken as a sample in trading as well.

As you probably guess, BANKEX develops a terminal solution. Undoubtedly it will have a connection to many exchanges including BANKEX own. More details follow later; our R&D team continues working on it. Now we can say that new terminal will be equipped with a rich analytical toolset, capabilities of portfolio management, robo-advising, robo-trading and other advanced things.

As well, our platform will support traditional centralized and decentralized exchanges allowing a user to work with his wallet or through his on the exchange.

Meanwhile, community members can try beta: https://terminal.bankex.com, user ‘demo:demo’, password ‘demo’.

Arbitrage opportunity

Arbitrage is buying a security in one market and simultaneously selling it in another market at a higher price, profiting from a temporary difference in rates. This is considered riskless profit for the investor/trader. (Investopedia)

On efficient markets like stocks and forex price variations are seldom and narrow, 1–2%. Thus, profitable arbitrage trading is possible only with high volumes and de-facto available just for professional traders. Opposite, cryptocurrencies may vary in price in a wide range that provides excellent opportunity for riskless trading.

For example, at the beginning of January bitcoin price in South Korea was 43% higher than those in the U.S. This anomaly explained by strong local demand, from one hand, and strict foreign-exchange regulations. To arbitrage the price gaps between bitcoin venues in Korea and elsewhere, local traders must first exchange their won into a dollars or euros but residents and companies moving more than $50,000 out of the country in a single year must submit documents to authorities proving their reasons for the transfers, which may not always be approved. Annual transactions totaling more than $10,000 must be reported to tax authorities, Bloomberg says.

Anyway, even at US-based exchanges price of bitcoin, ether and other major cryptocurrencies varies from one to another 10% and more and many traders want to exploit that market inefficiency. In answer, this challenge developers build-in arbitrage trading features directly into their terminals, BANKEX doing this as well. With our terminal, you’ll be able to do low-risk arbitrage trades.

High-frequency trading and blockchain productivity

There is a paradox: crypto is a highly volatile market but with very slow transactions. For example, average confirmation time for bitcoin may achieve 12 minutes; during the same time, bitcoin price can change by $300. It’s clear that you can’t sell and buy bitcoins with high speed to follow the market movements as intraday traders do on a stock exchange.

(Source: Blockchain.info)

(Source: TradingView)

Fans of HFT claim that within a single exchange you don’t get “normal” transactions. There are no coins transferred, not even when trading on margin — these days most exchanges implemented more secure and faster internal solutions, and there is only a symbolic transfer of ownership (keys).

OK, this approach can work for speculations, but technically it isn’t real crypto trading, anyway. So, the future of cryptocurrency high-frequency trading depends on radical improving blockchain productivity. If blockchain transaction time will be within milliseconds interval, it makes crypto-HFT real. The situation may change with Plasma protocol implementation — BANKEX Foundation team works over this solution.



To trade crypto assets as professional, one needs to use professional tools — and BANKEX terminal promise to become one of the best, because at design level we took into account all current challenges and trends. We believe traders will love it like famous red swiss army knife.