Digitex Futures CEO reveals desire to compete with BitMEX

Digitex Futures CEO Adam Todd has revealed that his company aims to compete with major cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following a planned Beta launch in December. Its ‘commission-free’ futures exchange will be ‘huge’ for the cryptocurrency space moving into 2019, he claims.

Digitex aims to incorporate elements of a decentralised exchange with the successful elements of a centralised exchange, offering traders security, speed and an attractive user interface.

In an interview with Coin Rivet, Todd said: “We’re focussed on futures, BitMEX is definitely in our sights, we have a lot of advantages over them, zero fees and the non-custodial aspect. And we’re Ethereum-based, not Bitcoin-based. BitMEX is built on ancient technology, it takes 24 hours to get your money out, with us you’re dealing with a smart contract and you get your funds within 10 seconds.”

On the topic of server capability in light of BitMEX’s trouble with overload in 2018, he continued: “We’re confident and we’re doing everything we can, those are the sort of problems you can buy your way out of, you can buy hardware. The guys that are building our exchange are from the telecoms industry so they’ve got 30 years of experience building robust and bulletproof systems.”

Todd went on to discuss the non-custodial aspect of the exchange, stating that when you deposit funds they go straight to a smart contract, meaning that, even if the exchange were to experience downtime, users would still have control of their funds, which could be manually withdrawn via the smart contract.

This is potentially a ‘huge step’ in encouraging traders of traditional financial markets to trade cryptocurrency. Todd explained how a major deterrent in the past has been the trust aspect of holding large amounts of capital on an exchange that could vanish overnight.

He added: “There’s no trust in the industry because let’s face it, half of these exchanges are scams and you really don’t know if you’re getting your money back. It’s a gamble holding your funds on exchanges. We need to give people a reason why they would switch over to crypto and I believe the non-custodial aspect is bigger than the zero fees.”

The exchange plans to launch in Q1 2019. It will be offering up to 100x leverage, if all goes well during the aforementioned testing phase.

“We have 450,000 people signed up on our waitlist and we expect that to be over one million by the end of the year. Only the first 5,000 on the list will get into the Beta stage, we’re going to give them money to trade with instead of taking deposits so we can successfully test all aspects,” Todd concluded.