Anyone familiar with our project, Digitex Futures, will know that it’s been a long and eventful journey to get here. But we’ve stayed the course. Even during the worst bear market imaginable when many other projects had to throw in the towel, we’ve managed to survive.
Like all crypto projects, we’ve had our ups and downs. Yet, here we are starting closed testing this week and just three weeks away from launching our public testnet! I had the opportunity to share a working demo of our upcoming commission-free bitcoin futures exchange last Friday and I’m encouraged by the response so far.
Things are finally real. The platform is not perfect yet but I’m incredibly excited to be at this stage. We’ve already begun onboarding the initial group of closed testers and--with their help and the help of all the public testers later--we’ll smooth out any bugs to make this the real BitMEX killer of an exchange I always intended it to be.
Creating a Commission-Free Trading Environment
When I was working as a futures trader in the London trading pits in the 1990s, commissions were the bane of my life. I never really knew or cared about what I was trading. I didn’t know what a German government bond was. I just aggressively entered and exited positions as quickly as possible and traded on momentum.
I would study the price trend and try to accumulate the smallest of profits from fractional movements in price. I had good and bad days like all traders and I learned that the more risk came the longer I kept a position open, so I would aim to buy and sell and just get one tick profits. I would aim to minimize my losses rather than looking to maximize my profits. My style of trading is called scalping and it’s one that suffers the most at the hand of commission fees.
There were many days that could have been winning ones for me but were turned into losers after paying out commissions. I always thought it was so unfair that the market’s most active traders, the ones providing all the liquidity, were the ones punished by commissions. I dreamed of a place where I could trade commission-free and where other traders like me could enter and exit as many positions as they liked without having PnL affected.
That’s what planted the seed to somehow one day come up with an environment that would allow traders to trade as freely as they wished. But, I never really thought it was possible until I discovered Ethereum and the ability to create your own token. That’s when I knew this could actually become a reality and when our ICO sold out in 17 minutes, it really hit home how much demand there was.
Getting This Far Through Dogged Determination
Now that we’re so close to reaching our goals, I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Not least of all, the fact that building a commission-free BTC futures exchange is f**king hard. Hiring the right talent in this nascent space and asking them to build something with no precedent is a bit like landing in unknown terrain without a map or a compass.
You’re literally navigating blind. Digitex Futures will hit mainnet and be the highly liquid, active scalpers’ paradise I always dreamed it would be mainly due to my sheer refusal to give up even when the going got tough. I’ve heard the word “no” so many times since I set out on the journey. But that’s not a word that sits well with me.
When we decided to move forward with the SmartDec development team, it became clear to me how far off we were from achieving our goals with the other teams. I’ve also been involved in the development process at every step, explaining how I want things to look and demanding nothing but the highest standard from everyone on the team. I was just utterly consumed with the fact that this had to succeed and that I would deliver on my promise, no matter what.
A Game-Changing User Interface
I honestly believe that our interface will be one of the main things that attracts traders to our platform, besides commission-free trading, of course. Using a ladder is just such an intuitive way to trade.
The price is literally moving up and down in front of you, so you never have to take your eyes off the price action. You can place trades with just a single click of the mouse, you can cancel them with a single click, you can really stay in the zone without any additional mouse strokes or action on the keyboard.
We’ve also made a conscious decision to change the tick value from 1 DGTX to 0.1 DGTX. This is because we expect DGTX to increase in value as we get closer to mainnet launch. By keeping the tick value small, we’ll make sure that Digitex is always open to smaller traders, aligning with our ethos of making trading accessible to everyone.
Quitters Never Win and Winners Never Quit
There’s a saying out there that quitters never win and winners never quit. It really resonates with me. We’re about to open the doors on our public testnet and I can hardly believe it myself. I’ve had to make some very tough calls and difficult decisions along the way that have been highly criticized. But, I knew I could never quit. Digitex is going to create a lot of winners and, just like me, they’ll be the ones who never gave up.