Bybit Launches Futures Contracts Settled in USDC Stablecoin

The Singapore-based digital asset exchange Bybit has expanded the variety of its crypto options trading services to its customers with a launch of new futures contracts settled in USDC stablecoins.

Bybit announced on Monday that it has launched futures contracts settled in the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), rather than Bitcoin.

This is the first time Bybit is offering futures settled in USDC, as part of an effort to give users stable prices for the duration of contracts.

The new product allows users to trade futures contracts using their balance on Bybit’s derivatives exchange. Bybit’s new options contracts enable experienced traders to use their balance as collateral and place long or short contracts with up to 100x leverage, depending on their expiration dates.

While Bybit’s portfolio margin account currently supports USDT, USDC, BTC and ETH as collateral, the firm plans to add more assets soon.

The new service enables customers to trade options through portfolio margin, which employs a risk-based model for sophisticated investors to increase fund utilization on the underlying price and volatility.

The service enables Bybit’s users to speculate on the future price of an underlying digital asset and settle trades in USDC.

Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, commented about the development: “We have been very pleased by the roll-out of our options trading product. We have received excellent feedback from our users too — they love our user-friendly products. Coupled with our 24/7 multilingual customer support, we have been able to help all traders take trading to the next level with a wide range of financial products.”

According to data from CoinMarketCap, Bybit is the fourth largest crypto exchange in futures trading volume in April, data compiled by Skew, a major real-time analytics for the crypto market showed that Bybit, a crypto exchange with more than 2 million registered users, overtook the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) as the second-largest Bitcoin futures exchange by open interest (OI).

Bybit executed $2.48 billion in BTC futures open interest, CME had $2.3 billion, while Binance is still the lead institutional and retail investors to prefer exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, and others because of their outstanding reliability, low spread, and high liquidity when the battle between shorts and longs heat up.

Open interest refers to the total number of outstanding derivative contracts, such as options or futures held by market users at the end of a day. Open interest is measured by the total level of activity in the futures market.