Announced Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Invest NYC conference, the technology provider is adding support for margin trading, with a raft of trading options and controls for crypto brokerages and exchanges utilizing its software.
Crypto software firm AlphaPoint is bringing margin trading to its client exchanges.
AlphaPoint’s platform is customizable, to better serve clients operating in different markets and regulatory regimes, spokesman Patrick Shields told CoinDesk:
“Rather than creating a one-size fits all model, we focused on creating a platform that is highly configurable”, he said. “Some examples include requiring approval workflow for end users, and configurable minimum deposit size, leverage and liquidation levels, fees and other settings.”
At launch, the company said that no clients were immediately implementing AlphaPoint margin trading, but “several firms” are beta testing the platform, including the Canadian cryptocurrency trader National Digital Asset Exchange (NDAX), according to a press release.
Bilal Hammoud, NDAX founder and CEO, said in a statement that he looked forward to the partnership:
“We will bring BTC to CAD margin trading to Cryptocurrency and allow traders to enjoy a secure, compliant, and technologically advanced platform.”
Margin trading – when one buys a security (or in this case a cryptocurrency) using borrowed funds – is becoming increasingly prevalent in the crypto space as many popular exchanges continue implementing the feature. Binance rolled out margin trading in July, and Bakkt, Coinbase’s professional trading platform and Kraken all have the option.
But that increase has not come without pushback. Certain countries around the world have discouraged crypto margin trades and placed tight controls on the practice, as in Japan.
Amazon Cloud Outage Causing Major Issues at Some Crypto Exchanges
Problems with Amazon’s cloud service, AWS, are disrupting services at some cryptocurrency exchanges on Friday.
The Binance exchange is seeing problems internationally, according to its CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who tweeted:
It’s causing some 500 error messages on APIs and affecting some withdrawal processing
– CZ Binance (@cz_binance) August 23, 2019
The KuCoin cypto exchange is also saying there are problems with its AWS Tokyo-hosted services.
The firm states on its website:
“Due to the overheating of part of our chassis in the machine room we deployed in AWS, Tokyo, part of our services might become unavailable. The engineering operation team is currently deploying relevant resources of high availability across regions to deal with any possible emergencies that might happen. Some services might be effected during the deployment.”
Founding partner at Primitive Ventures Dovey Wan has tweeted that a number of Asian exchanges are affected and the AWS issues are producing erratic market data.
“Many Asian exchanges see price instability (and trades were able to execute, yes you can buy extremely cheap Bitcoin if you had limit orders there)”, she wrote.
She also tweeted a screen grab, apparently of order book data from an unnamed exchange that a customer had posted in the BitMax exchange’s official Telegram channel. It suggests traders have been able to buy 45 bitcoin for less than $1 (in the tether stablecoin, USDT). The price of bitcoin at time of writing should be around $10,190, according to CoinDesk’s global average price index.
BitMax has since announced in its Telegram channel that it’s halting withdrawals, although it’s still not certain the price data is sourced from their platform. Other sources suggest the screenshot may reflect data from a different exchange.
In a similar instance, some users were able to execute trades on bitcoin for as low as $0.32, based on CITEX exchange’s order book (see long green candle on image below). The candle appears backed by high volumes as orders were presumably triggered by the super-low price.
AWS’ status page indeed indicates that there are problems at its Tokyo facility. The firm says it has found the root cause and the situation is starting to return to normal.
CoinDesk has reached out to confirm the reports of bitcoin purchases at sub-$1 levels and will update this article if more information is received.
