Bitpanda Pro: Crypto exchange will launch derivatives in 2022
Bitpanda is now well known in Europe as a neo broker and for millions of retail customers, it is the first address for buying Bitcoin or selected stocks. But in the professional field, the Viennese scale-up still plays a rather subordinate role. The in-house exchange with the surname “Pro” (formerly Bitpanda Global Exchange) currently ranks somewhere between 60 and 80 in the ranking of trading volumes of the largest crypto exchanges, depending on the day.
The declared goal of Joshua Barraclough, the new CEO of Bitpanda Pro (formerly JPMorgan), is to lead the crypto exchange into the top 10 and to bring the current daily trading volume of several million euros towards the billion. At least that’s the level where the leading exchanges in the charts (such as Huobi GLobal, KuCoin, or Kraken) operate today. This rise should also be achieved by expanding the offer.
Derivatives will come in 2022
“It is fairly unfeasible to have a sophisticated institutional offering without moving into the derivatives space,” says Barraclough in the latest podcast interview with Trending Topics. “As a minimum, there will be a trading offering of some derivatives to our customers sometime next year.” Exactly: As The Block reported, Barraclough confirms the planned entry of the Exchange into trading in derivatives. The corresponding job advertisements for experts who can implement such products were a hint for the plans of the company.
Bitpanda Pro: The crypto exchange that tackles the top 10 of the market
Derivatives: Complex financial products
Derivatives are financial products such as CFDs, futures, options, swaps, or certificates that can be derived from an underlying asset. Underlying assets can be stocks, bonds, interest rates, indices, commodities, or currencies. In general, such complex financial products are intended for professionals and institutional investors who deal with them intensively and also professionally bear the given risk. It would also be conceivable that shares of companies that are not yet listed on the stock exchange are tokenized and made tradable on the exchange.
In any case, derivatives are financial products that are available from Binance and FTX, among others. FTX brought around 60 tokenized shares to its platform in cooperation with Swiss Digital Assets AG (DAAG) in the summer, and FTX also offers a whole range of futures. This business is certainly not easy. Binance, for example, has also introduced tokenized shares (from Tesla, Coinbase, and others) but had to stop trading with them quickly after regulatory problems.
Analysis: Bitpanda is now playing in the top league of the global crypto industry
At Bitpanda, and therefore also at Bitpanda Pro, they rely heavily on the European market and a regulated environment in which crypto assets, but also derivatives are offered – this is the only way to win the big institutional players, says Barraclough. This corresponds to Bitpanda’s general strategy, which is by no means common in the crypto industry: The Austrian company regularly secures itself through lively exchanges with regulatory authorities in the markets. As a result, it may be slower than others with new products on the market, but it does not conflict with the requirements of the authorities, as is the case with Binance, for example.
