There is something that bothers me for some time. If someone knows the answers, it would be nice to share them. It is about the derivate markets. It is clear that the cash settled futures contract divert money from acutal invesment in Bitcoin, thus creating an artificial paper liquidity. My quiestion is whether what is happening on the derivate exchanges can lead to a pump/dump of the spot exchanges? It is supposed that derivate exchanges follow the spot exchanges with their index price, not vice versa, but is this the reality? I have the gut feeling that the spot exchange traders look at the derivate exchanges and if they see a dump there, they also sell. Which is illogical especially for the cash settled contracts. Because nobody can transfer a paper bitcoin and sell it on a spot exchange. But the daily traders have proved many times they have no clue about... anything, even basic math. Also, I wonder if Binance has a physical futures contracts like bakkt, because a lot of derivate trade is going on there lately and it seems to has an impact on the spot price.
Can paper derivatives effect the underlying? Yes. Can it get to the point where the tail's wagging the dog? Possible, and therere examples in history when that happened, but i don't believe that it's happening with BTC.
Just a hypothetical, lets image you have 100.000 cash settled futures contracts which you got at an average price of $40.000/BTC, they expire today and lets say they use exchange's XYZ spot as a reference rate.
Imagine that current spot on XYZ is $37.500.
1-You don't do anything, Futures settle at $37,5k, you loose $2.500 per contract so you're
down $250MM total. That sucks!
2-You look at XYZ and notice that the ask side of the book is pretty thin, you estimate that there will only be
BTC5.000 for sale between $37,5k and $42,5k. You transfer $200MM to XYZ and buy everything in sight until $42.5k.
=You're successful and price closes at $42,5k. You're up $2,5k per contract or $250M from futures, but you bought
BTC5k for $200MM, so you end up with $50MM and
BTC5k profit.
=You're not successful and market actually moves against you and settles at $35k. You lost $500MM on futures, and paid $200M for
BTC5k which are now only worth $175MM. -525MM REKT
And it works the other way around. If you sold futures, and then try to short the spot to bring it down so you're more profitable.
Problem is you need to corner the market to be able to pull this off, and there are always bigger whales. Futures platforms are not that dumb too, so theyre using weighted averages across multiple exchanges as a reference rate
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/cryptocurrency-indices/cf-bitcoin-reference-rate.htmlThere are hedge fund market makers and then there are youtube daily traders that cant do basic math. Don't confuse the two.
BAKKT is not even on a map anymore, do they even still offer BTC futures? Binance is currently the biggest dog and believe they're BTC settled.
https://analytics.skew.com/dashboard/bitcoin-futures Edit: fillippone popped in right on time, he has a whole thread on futures
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-btc-futures-but-were-afraid-to-ask-5188060It seems that margin trades with leverage are like cash settled futures but they involve real bitcoins. Thus the margin trading can affect directly the spot price, even whithout delibarate manipulations. So, what happened in the last year is that many thought the bull run will continue and opened all kinds of leverage margin longs. Each time someone bought and the price rose 1-2% the highest leverage longs hurried to close the positions realizing some profit depending on the leverage. That would bring the price at the previous level, and in some cases lower. Which in turn would trigger a margin call and liquidations of the high leverage longs that weren't closed. And so on, the long squeeze happened many times with some days of ~$1bil long losses. At the peaks before the crashes longs were above $3bil. Now, the longs are at the lowest level at $1.5bil and the shorts are climbing up. Obviously many think that we are in a bear market and expect another crash. This may lead to the opposite - a short squeeze. For the Binance longs/shorts I follow the free
, although it does not tell which part is margin and which is futures cash contracts.