Delta Exchange, ByBit, FTX: Unbiased Analysis of Crypto Derivatives Exchanges

Overview

1. Delta Exchange is a crypto derivatives exchange launched in August, 2018. Initially, only BTC/USD Futures contract had been offered, but by the end of 2018, the team added futures on altcoins and pioneered the sphere of stablecoin-settled contracts. Since 2019, perpetual contracts option is available for the users of exchange.
   
   The director and managerial boards are formed of the Indian Institutes of Technology graduates with solid banking (Citi and UBS) and entrepreneurial backgrounds. Linkedin profiles of all the employees, founders and advisors are available. Since the very first day Pankaj Balani works as an exchange CEO. The exchange  is legally incorporated as Bit Protocol Ltd. in St Vincent and the Grenadines and has offices in Singapore and India.

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2. ByBit is a cryptocurrency derivatives platform established back in March, 2018. It is registered in the British Virgin Islands and has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
   The only member of ByBit core team who is disclosed in the dedicated section is its CEO, Ben Zhou with 150+ anonymous team members on board. Mr. Zhou had been a general manager for the Greater China region for Forex brokers XM for seven years, before co-founding Bybit in early 2018. 

3. FTX is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange launched in Q3, 2019. It is owned by FTX Trading LTD, an incorporated company in Antigua and Barbuda. FTX offers numerous types of futures and spot contracts as well as OTC trades. FTX  pioneers the market of the futures on altcoins indexes.
   
   FTX is a product of the Alameda Research liquidity provider. The two entities have the same leader, Mr. Sam Bankman-Fried. Before founding Alameda, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. Gary Wang, a former software engineer at Google, is a company CTO. The service issued its native FTT token.

Trading Toolkit & Cryptocurrency Pairs

Delta Exchange offers traditional futures on Bitcoin (BTC) as well as perpetual and quanto perpetual contracts on top altcoins, including Ripple (XRP), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Waves (WAVES) and Binance Coin (BNB). In total, the users of exchange can trade 22 altcoins with the leverage rates between 5x and 100x.

Contracts can be settled and margined on both BTC and USDC/USDT stablecoins. Funding rate for perpetual contracts is expressed as an 8 hour rate and is exchanged between longs and shorts continuously.

ByBit offers perpetual contracts on four assets - Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS), Ripple (XRP). All ByBit contracts are inverse contracts, i.e. margining and settlement of each contract happen in the underlying currency. E.g. it means that BTCUSD perpetual is margined in BTC, the ETHUSD perpetual is margined in ETH etc. Funding payments are exchanged only once every 8 hours.

FTX offers rich trading toolkit with both expiry (time-limited) futures and perpetual contracts. 28 altcoins are available for a perpetual futures contracts settlement while 24 altcoins can be traded within time-limited futures mode.

Also, some crypto indexes (altcoins, native exchange tokens, low-cap coins (‘shitcoins’) etc.) are available. The ‘MOVE’ type of contract works similarly to binary options. On FTX, funding payments are exchanged between longs and shorts once every hour.

Fees, deposits, withdrawals

Typically, crypto derivatives exchanges charge their clients with two types of fees: maker fees (paid by the trader that brings liquidity to the exchange) and taker fees (paid by the trader that takes the liquidity). The funding rate (paid peer-to-peer) is an indicator derived from the current market demand for a given asset. 

Delta Exchange charges the traders with 0.075% taker fees / -0.025% maker fees (for BTC and ETH contracts) and with 0.05% taker fees / -0.25% maker fees for any other coin. Negative maker fees mean that the user would receive a rebate.

Funding rate may vary historically and is set between -0.2% for Enjin (ENJ) perpetual contract and 0.2% for Matic (MATIC) perpetual contract. Deposit is free, withdrawal costs depend on Bitcoin network status. Those who need to withdraw 2+ BTC/day may be asked for additional KYC/AML-procedures.

ByBit offers equal trading fees for all four contracts: 0.075% taker fees / -0.025% maker fees. By the way, funding rates also vary from 0.0049% for ETHUSD perpetual contract to 0.0273% for EOSUSD perpetual contract. ByBit charges its clients with zero deposit and withdrawal fees but warns them about mining costs.

FTX is characterized by relatively high fees. It charges both makers (0,01-0,02%) and takers (0,04 - 0,07%). Only users with monthly trading volume starting from 1 million USD can enjoy a discount. By the way, these rates can be reduced by purchasing native FTT tokens. The leveraged tokens have creation and redemption fees of 0.10%, and daily management fees of 0.03%.

Using leverage of 50x  increases trading fees by 0.02%, and 100x or higher trading fees increase by 0.03%, which is paid to the insurance fund. FTX has neither deposit nor withdrawal fees.

Fees Policy of Crypto Derivatives Exchanges

User Interface

It looks like the three services have very similar interfaces. Its main part, trading engine, typically consists of trading charts, orderbook with bid and ask orders, list of recent trades and information about the market activity.

Delta Exchange home page offers the trader basic information about the service, crypto derivatives trading glossary and updated trading statistics.

It seems very user-friendly that from the very first step on this website, Delta Exchange's user sees the whole range of assets he is able to trade. It also has a dedicated analytics portal which has interesting charts and data from leading derivatives and margin trading exchanges.

ByBit’s main page is devoted to the recent and ongoing promotional campaigns. Scrolling down, users can find some interesting statistics about the platform progress and features as well as ByBit blog and vision. 

Due to its analytical background, FTX team added up-to-date statistics of trading and derivatives crypto exchanges on the top spot.

Other Information

Bonuses

Just like classic spot crypto exchanges, derivatives platform offers some initial bonuses for their clients. The highest bonuses are offered by Delta Exchange (50% for the first deposit, up to 0.02 BTC or almost $160 at the time of this article).

ByBit exchange offers a multi-level bonus program but minimum sum of deposit is set to participate in this program. For example, those deposited more than 0.05 BTC, 3 ETH, 140 EOS, 1900 XRP, can get a $5 bonus. The users with big deposits (bigger than 0.5 BTC, 30 ETH, 1400 EOS or 19000 XRP) can get $50.

FTX exchange didn’t publish information about bonuses. Maybe, a bonus program is included in the discount strategy for FTT traders.

Mobile Applications

Delta Exchange has a progressive web application while both ByBit and FTX services released their official applications for iOs- and Android-based devices. The software of ByBit can be downloaded from the AppStore and Google Play, while FTX products are also available on Android Market as an .apk file.   

Languages

Delta Exchange has the richest toolkit of localizations. It is available in Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and Vietnamese languages.

ByBit has Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian versions while FTX adds to this list Vietnamese, German, French and Italian versions.

Geographical Restrictions

None of the services reviewed is available from the territory of the United States, Cuba, Crimea & Sevastopol, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Sudan. Delta Exchange also doesn’t work in Puerto Rico, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Pakistan while ByBit is also unavailable in Canada’s Quebec and Singapore.

Affiliate Programs & APIs

All three services provide their clients with the possibility of operating via APIs. Delta Exchange and ByBit have attractive  affiliate programs. With Delta Exchange, the affiliate gets15% commission share for the first 6 months and subsequently 10% commission share for lifetime, for every trade made by his referrals. ByBit’s affiliate program offers 30-40% commision share but requires a special registration.

Conclusion

Finally, we can conclude that all three crypto derivatives  platforms offer cutting-edge trading environments. This similarity aside, the three exchanges are targeting different use-cases and customer segments. 

Delta Exchange platform seems to be the leader of this review. Delta is able  to strike the right balance between performance and usability. With its multi-asset trading toolkit, advanced order types (e.g. bracket orders) and user-friendly interface, it can be called ‘one-size-fits-all’ platform for an average crypto derivatives trader. 

FTX is clearly designed for more seasoned traders. Furthermore, both its toolkit and interface demonstrate that not only private but also institutional investors are welcomed on this platform. So, FTX is best for crypto whales and ‘old hands’ in trading.

ByBit is better suited for the inexperienced and young traders, crypto newbies. ByBit is well-known in the community because of interesting promotional games and exciting trading competitions. So, it is better to start with the four-asset toolkit of the ByBit.