Deribit Review: Futures or Options Trading for Professional Traders
Deribit might have the most polished and best performing derivatives market available
Deribit Rating
Deribit is one of the largest futures and options markets available and is growing very fast. Good liquidity!
- Trust 9.8
- Design 9.7
- Fees 9.8
- Markets 9.2
- Support 9.5
Deribit is a full-featured, high-performance Bitcoin and Ethereum based futures and options platform with an extremely clean UI and presentation. I think out of all the platforms I review, they have the most soothing interface. You can really tell they put a ton of thought and effort into every detail.
Deribit is based in the Netherlands, with their home base in Amsterdam. Sorry, no US or Dutch customers, but I will point out they don't do any KYC at all either. You could always check out a VPN, but when you do sign up if you use the link below you will save on fees:
Official Site: Deribit (https://www.deribit.com) <– Save 10% on fees for 6 months!
Alright, let's deep dive into some of the features that really make Deribit stand out from the pack…
Deribit's Products: Not Just Futures
They currently offer several products for either BTC or ETH: 1 perpetual market, and 2 futures markets – but what I really like about Deribit is that you're not limited to just futures and perpetual contracts, they also carry options. Options are very useful for betting on volatility, or large price movements, so you can imagine how incredibly powerful it can be when applied to crypto markets. I also don't know of anyone else offering this, so kudos to Deribit.
While it's a bit outside the scope of this review, here's a quick introduction to options trading I found on YouTube:
Trading Futures on Deribit
The easiest way to trade on Deribit is via their futures products, with the perpetual contracts being the most liquid and well liked. Futures contracts are priced at $10 each with the default leverage being 1:10, but Deribit does allow for leverage as high as 50x. You'll see all the usual interface panes on Deribit: a sleek TradingView chart, an order book, recent trades, and your position details. The mark price will be set to the Deribit index which is derived from the average prices from 5 external exchanges.
One thing I will quickly point out that so many exchanges get wrong is that you can actually see the order book depth. This means I can zoom out and see where the support and resistance is on the order book itself. Some interfaces will not let you zoom out far enough and it really annoys me, so there it is.
Yes, Deribit Allows Movable Orders Right from within the Chart
This is a killer feature. The community asked for this and it was added in early 2019. Bitmex was the first to introduce movable orders right from within the chart and now Deribit has implemented it flawlessly as well. So much less typing, and now you can quickly move orders when market conditions change. It really is a must-have feature and will actually improve your trading in my opinion.
Placing Orders on Deribit
Placing orders is familiar, you have: limit, market, and stop-limit, stop-market – the latter two you can use for taking profit or setting stops. The order pane is really clean and straight forward with handy tool tips, and you can denominate the values in either USD or crypto.
You also have options for post or reduce only, and hidden order types. A post-only order will force your order to be placed on the book as a limit order (fomo protection), and reduce only will only allow your order to reduce your position, not add to it. Take a look at right to see the order pane, or click for a larger version. Again, you can hover over these items in the interface to get a tool tip explaining what it does. Very handy as you'll find this throughout the interface.
Once you've placed an order and/or have a position open you'll be able to see it in the Positions panel near the bottom of the screen. Once again it is clean, simple, and gives you all the information you'll need.
Fees & Funding
The fee structure on Deribit is nearly identical to Bitmex. It's straight forward and rewards the maker, so do your best to limit-order in/out of your trades:
Perpetual Contracts
Maker Rebate: 0.025%
Taker Fee: 0.075%
Futures
Maker Rebate: 0.02%
Taker Fee: 0.05%
Options
0.04% of underlying or 0.0004 BTC/option contract
Fees can never rise more than 12.5% of the price of the option
In order to trade leveraged you need to pay something to borrow, depending on if you are long or short. Sometimes longs pay shorts, and vice versa. This is called funding. At Deribit funding works a bit different. The Deribit perpetual contract calculates funding every millisecond, unlike Bitmex and Bybit. This means you’re constantly paying funding rather than paying it all at once at a specific time. It's actually a much more logical approach to funding.
Yes it is Lightning Fast and Error Free
All of this is great but how does the exchange perform? I trade a lot during times of volatility and other platforms often error out during these times. It's cost me LOTS of crypto. I can tell you now that submission or overload errors never occur at Deribit. At least I've yet to experience them. And on top of that, executions are lightning fast, virtually instant. Deribit claims their trding engine can handle upwards of 7-10k tps (transactions per seconds) and they are always adding more hardware to handle their growth. All-in-all I was very impressed.
What I really like about Deribit
Okay so the exchange is phenomenal, and feels professional on every level, but what I really love about Deribit is that they listen to their community. For instance, Deribit has a telegram group where they directly interface with their customers. When customers asked for features, the Deribit team actually listened and directly implemented them. Very refreshing these days to see this type of interaction.
They also run some amazing contests with fantastic prizes, some of which got tons of attention in the community. They're worth following: @DeribitExchange. Check out this meme entry winner from 2018:
Comprehensive BTC derivative exchange review.mp4 #deribitmeme pic.twitter.com/anWfXYgpTo
— Jim (@JimBTC) September 24, 2018
Deribit Video Review
See below for a Deribit trading video and guide to get you started.
Official Site: Deribit (https://www.deribit.com) <– Save 10% on fees for 6 months!
Pros
- Polished and extremely clean trading GUI, with super fast executions and no errors
- Deribit is legally structured / based in the Netherlands, with servers in France
- Movable orders right within the TradingView chart. Sweet!
- The Deribit perpetual contract calculates funding every millisecond, unlike Bitmex and Bybit. This means you’re constantly paying/receiving funding rather than all at once at a specific time
- No deposit or withdrawal fees
- Leverage up to 50x
- Robust trading API
- Website works nicely on mobile
- Often has hilarious meme-worthy marketing and fun contests the community loves
- Anonymous accounts allowed, no KYC
Cons
- Deposit only in BTC or ETH
- Needs more coins, only ETH, BTC for now!
- No fiat or stable coin support
- The placement of the panels is perfect, but you can’t customize them either
- Restricted for USA / the Netherlands