Derivatives exchange OKEx targets small investors with real-time data

Top cryptocurrency derivatives exchange OKEx announced a new initiative aiming to make its ether (ETH) derivatives more transparent and easier for average investors to understand.

The Oct. 6 announcement comes on the same day the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority banned derivatives platforms from serving retail customers due to the complexity of the products, which include options, swaps and futures. 

OKEx is collaborating with crypto market analytics site Skew to create a real-time dashboard with data about ether derivatives. The firm’s head of financial markets, Lennix Lai, explained:

“We will be helping traders understand how to interpret the information on the Ether markets by publishing an in-depth guide that makes the charts useful rather than intimidating and helps them at the time of making their trading decisions.”

This is not the first such announcement by OKEx, as the exchange has been providing market data to power Skew’s Bitcoin dashboard since March. OKEx CEO Jay Hao said at the time that “the transparency of exchanges has increasingly become a concern for traders” and added:

“We hope to provide traders with a true and reliable channel for mastering OKEx trading data, while enhancing the overall transparency of the industry.”

A rapidly evolving exchange

OKEx is one of the cryptocurrency exchanges that is betting on expansion and new features the most aggressively. In mid-September, the trading platform listed a full derivative suite for UNI—the token of the decentralized exchange Uniswap which has shot to the top of the DeFi Pulse Index with $2.27 billion in locked funds.

At the end of August, OKEx placed a clear bet on decentralized finance by listing eight different tokens from the space in one single day. The tokens include Band Protocol (BAND), Just (JST), Ren (REN), Reserve Rights (RSR), Yearn.finance (YFI), Nexus Mutual (NXM), YFII.finance (YFII) and Tellor (TRB), in addition to Yearn.finance.

In a recent exclusive interview with Modern Consensus, OKEx CEO Jay Hao made it very clear that the exchange is aggressively betting on decentralized finance. He said:

“DeFi really has limitless potential depending on how well its participants overcome its vulnerabilities and aches and pains as it grows. There is always the possibility that this great blockchain experiment will fail. However, it is our strong belief that DeFi will continue to flourish and eventually grow up to be a viable alternative and supplement to the traditional financial system.”