A new trading product developed by Hxro (pronounced "hero") and leading derivatives exchange FTX is betting that retail cryptocurrency traders could invest on the options markets if only options trading was easier.
TixWix to make market data on options more familiar to crypto traders
Hxro, in partnership with FTX, built the new TixWix product to target an audience of potential crypto options traders, providing complex market data in a format familiar to anyone using other prediction and betting platforms for sports, politics, etc. said CEO Dan Gunsberg.
Hxro entered the cryptocurrency trading market in March 2019 with its MoonRekt binary futures, launched to a user base of over 100.000 people. Since starting the company, Hxro co-founders Gunsberg and Rob Levy have relied on their previous careers as traders in traditional markets to design new products for cryptocurrency traders.
Their new product, announced Wednesday, leverages the FTX backend to support an options trading interface that abstracts the "complexities of non-linear risk factors" and "complexity around the Greeks," Gunsberg said, referring to common risk measures - delta, theta, gamma and rho - used by options traders. Instead of an otherwise complicated options contract with a 5% chance of expiring at a certain price, for example, TixWix serves the same trade as a simple bet with odds of 20 to 1, Levy explained.
A bet on the growth of the crypto options market
At launch, the new product supports the bitcoin and ether markets with two types of bets: Tix, which is the bet that the market will close above a certain price by a certain date, and Wix, the bet that the price will touch. a certain price before a certain date. TixWix is FTX's first feature from back-end vendor, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said.
His exchange already has experience offering betting and market predictions, with the ever-popular US presidential election markets seeing record volumes ahead of the November 3 event.
More broadly, TixWix is a bet by both companies on the future growth of the overall cryptocurrency options market, Levy said. The size of options trading in traditional markets is one of the reasons Levy expects significant growth in crypto options.
"The explosion of stock options we have seen in legalized markets is coming to cryptocurrencies," Levy said. "You need liquidity for this to happen, and we are starting to see real liquidity entering cryptocurrencies." With the cryptocurrency market advancing at full speed, Hxro and FTX plan to make it easily accessible even to amateur traders through “streamlined market shares in live streaming” on TixWix.
