Digitex Futures proves interest in crypto is high with 500,000 on waiting list

No one can deny the crypto carnage of late. The markets are red and bleeding and the cryptocurrency market cap has dwindled to one-fifth of its size since the beginning of the year to under $140 billion at time of writing.

Lately, positive stories to come out of crypto are few and far between.

But there is one project that we’ve been keeping our eye on, and that’s Digitex Futures. Their coin went on an insane bull run earlier in the year to see an unbelievable 2,800% growth back in Q3. Those numbers haven’t been sustainable, but that’s to be expected in the current climate and the DGTX (the native token of the exchange) is holding strong as a top 100 currency.

And better than that, their Early Access Waitlist for the beta launch coming out in a few weeks has hit 500k already. In fact, it’s something like 536K by now–and the team is counting! When I caught up with CEO Adam Todd at Malta Blockchain Summit he proclaimed that he was confident it would “reach one million by the time we launch”.

Bear Markets Aren’t Bad for Everything

We’d be lying if we didn’t say there were no casualties in the latest fallout, but at least the dwindling public interest in crypto and hyper-speculation on Bitcoin price pushed to one side allows blockchain companies to get to work. It’s not all hype, hype, hype, after all, and we’ve already seen project after project meet a sticky end before fulfilling its objective.

If 2017 was the year of the ICOs (well, the Digitex ICO was in January of this year) then 2018 and 2019 should be the years of delivering the goods. And it’s clear that the Digitex team has been working hard to provide their behemoth community (they have a Telegram group of over 55k) with the commission-free trading exchange they promised.

Why Are People So Interested in Digitex Futures?

The product, if it walks and talks as it’s meant to upon launch, pretty much sells itself. There is currently no futures exchange to offer commission-free trading. Moreover, as the company works hard on the next iterations of the exchange and incorporating plasma technology, it will be the only hybrid exchange to do so.

So, you have a team that’s comfortable with being on the cutting edge, that wants to be part of the Ethereum scaling solution, that doesn’t charge commission fees and that doesn’t hold onto your funds.

The exchange will never be a target for hackers since there is no cryptocurrency to be hacked. They also can’t interfere with any trades, no matter how abnormal the price or volatile the market (OKEx, anyone?).

Top-notch product aside (the one-click ladder trading system is really in a class of its own), Digitex is extremely astute when it comes to spreading the word about the project. They’re not camera shy and the waiting list has reached such epic numbers thanks to a referral system dreamed up by the marketing team.

The first 5,000 on the list will have access to the beta launch coming in a few weeks (exactly one year after the Digitex ICO). They’ll also get airdropped 1,000 DGTX to play around with. The top 10 winners get 100K apiece. So, apart from getting their hands on the platform first, traders are incentivised to climb up the list by referring friends. The more they refer, the higher up the list they go, and the waitlist swells. Pretty clever stuff.

The Futures Industry Is Taking Off

Futures trading is a trillion-dollar industry. Total transactions in 2017 were estimated at a massive $33.6 trillion. CME saw their daily volume increase by 93% in Q2 2018 after introducing futures, despite the bearish conditions. This means that the company is getting in on a growing industry in a new and disruptive way.

Adam Todd doesn’t plan on competing with exchanges like BitMEX – he plans on wiping them out completely. And there’s plenty of opportunity for improvement in the space, especially when it comes to reputation, trust, usability, and of course, trading with no fees.

DGTX tokens are currently available on a few exchanges, most notably HitBTC and the company has plans in the pipeline for more to come. While some days there doesn’t seem to be much to be cheerful about in crypto, at least the Digitex team is smiling.