Top 7 Best Crypto Futures Trading Platforms in 2022
Crypto futures offer traders and investors an excellent way to trade digital assets. To increase your chances of generating profits in the crypto futures market, it is important to choose a secure and liquid crypto futures trading platform.
Read on to discover a list of the best crypto futures trading platforms.
What are Crypto Futures?
Crypto futures are derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on the future price of an underlying cryptocurrency. In this way, investors can gain exposure to cryptocurrencies without having to hold them.
Simply put, when investors trade bitcoin futures contracts, they are speculating on bitcoin’s future price. In the main, there are two parties who bet. One party believes that the price of bitcoin will rise in the future, while the other party bets that the price of bitcoin will fall. The party that loses the bet pays the difference to the winner. This is part of the futures contract that both parties have signed when entering into it.
Crypto futures contracts have a specific number of units, price criteria, margin requirements and settlement methods that investors must take into account. Depending on current crypto market conditions, an investor may choose to hold a futures contract, roll it over, or sell it to another party.
Top trading platform for crypto futures
To start trading crypto futures, you need to create an account on a crypto derivatives trading platform. Let’s take a look at the most popular ones based on trading volume.
Binance
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange, with an average daily trading volume of $76 billion and over 120 million registered users. The crypto exchange was co-founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. The trading platform supports over 350 digital assets and allows users to buy and sell across thousands of trading pairs.
Binance Futures is the crypto derivatives arm of the Binance exchange. Since its introduction in late 2019, it has become the best platform for retail users due to its range of innovative products, simple user interface and seamless trading experience for users.
Binance offers one of the best choices for investors looking to trade crypto futures, as it supports a variety of crypto assets coupled with deep liquidity. In its entirety, Binance Futures provides access to four product categories: USD-margined Futures Contracts, Coin Managed Futures Contracts, Binance Leveraged Tokens and Binance Options.
In addition, Binance Futures offers traders a 10% discount on standard trading fees if they use BNB to pay for trading fees on the derivatives exchange. To enjoy this discount, you need to transfer BNB from the spot wallet to the futures wallet.
FTX
FTX is a Bahamas-based trading platform for crypto derivatives. Founded in 2019 by Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, the platform aims to be a leading path for crypto traders.
FTX supports 300+ cryptoassets at the time of writing, while the platform has a total trading volume of over $12 billion. In addition, FTX offers 250+ perpetual and quarterly futures markets.
FTX quarterly futures are suitable for traders who want to hold a position for a longer period of time. On the other hand, perpetual futures are good for trades a trader expects to close soon. Due to funding payments, their prices closely mirror BTC prices, almost similar to trading venue.
KuCoin
KuCoin is a crypto exchange that claims to offer technology-driven products and is built around the KuCoin token (KCS). The crypto exchange was founded in 2017 by Michael Gan, a software engineer who wanted to build a platform that was easy for users to navigate and offers innovative products offering over 700 tradable assets.
KuCoin Futures offers several trading products, such as cash-settled futures contracts. The contracts are divided into perpetual contracts and delivery contracts.
Perpetual contracts are settled after every 8-hour window, while delivery contracts are settled on a specific date. The futures contracts are grouped based on the settlement coins used in USDT margined and COIN margined contracts.
OKX
OKX is a Seychelles based crypto exchange and wallet provider. The platform offers crypto derivatives such as margin trading, perpetual swaps, options and of course futures. Formerly known as OKEX, the crypto exchange was founded in 2013 by Mingxing “Star” Xu, a Chinese entrepreneur.
OKX operates in over 100 countries and lists 350+ digital assets and almost twice as many in trading pairs. OKX supports trading of futures contracts for 13 cryptoassets.
The exchange offers two groups of futures contracts, namely futures with crypto margin and futures with USDT margin. Crypto-margined futures are settled in the underlying cryptocurrency, while USDT margins are settled in USDT.
Each futures contract offered by OKX is named according to the assets traded, the settlement date and the period for which it is traded. The options available to investors include weekly, fortnightly, quarterly and bi-quarterly. Futures contracts are settled every Friday at 08:00 UTC.
Huobi Global
Huobi Global is a crypto exchange and derivatives trading platform. Huobi Global supports 500+ digital assets on its platform and is available in over 100 countries. Huobi Global was founded in 2013 by Leon Li in Beijing, a former computer engineer at Oracle.
Huobi Futures offers investors and traders three types of product categories: USDT margin contracts, coin margin contracts and options.
USDT margin contracts are quoted and settled in USDT, while coin margin contracts derive their value from the underlying cryptocurrency.
Gate.io
Gate.io is a leading crypto exchange that supports over 1,400 digital assets and has over $12 billion in daily trading volume. The crypto exchange was founded in 2013 by its current CEO, Lin Han, a software engineer, who aimed to create a secure trading platform for bitcoin enthusiasts.
Gate.io offers three types of futures contracts: perpetual contracts, delivery contracts and quantitative strategy contracts.
City bit
City bit is a crypto derivatives platform that offers a professional platform with advanced matching capabilities, multilingual support and high quality customer service. The platform was founded in 2018 by Ben Zhou and is based in Singapore. Bybit serves more than 10 million users worldwide who can access over 100 assets and contracts across crypto derivatives such as futures.
Bybit offers several futures contracts, including USDT Perpetuals – Perpetual contracts using USDT as collateral, Inverse Perpetual and Futures – Perpetual and futures contracts using the underlying cryptocurrency as collateral, and USDC Perpetuals – Perpetual contracts using USDC as collateral.
The takeaway
Today’s leading crypto futures exchanges enable anyone with sufficient trading experience and capital to access the global crypto derivatives market in a secure and user-friendly manner.
If you are new to crypto trading, however, remember that futures trading involves leverage (resulting in higher risk than spot trading) and there are nuances to each futures contract. So make sure you know exactly what you are trading before you place your first crypto futures trade. And, of course, never risk more money than you can afford to lose!
