Bitfinex Derivatives, the derivatives marketplace that can be accessed through the Bitfinex crypto trading platform, has announced the launch of a perpetual contract for Solana.
The contract had gone live on 26th July and has been in the trading mode for about a week now. This contact would help the users to trade Solana with leverage of 100x and would be settled in the USDt.
“We’re delighted to announce the addition of Solana to the growing portfolio of perpetual swaps available to trade on the exchange,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex Derivatives. “We anticipate great interest in these products, particularly among funds and professional investors for hedging purposes and to manage risk.”
The Solana ecosystem has been growing strongly over the last few months with some massive investments being made into the network and it has made heads turn and the network has been seeing a lot of attention from users and developers as well. This has translated into the development of many dapps in the network over the last few months including NFT platforms, wallets, etc which has, in turn, spurred the growth of the user base.
Though it is being seen as a competitor and alternative to Ethereum, it still has a very long way and a lot of catching up to do. One of the main challenges that it is likely to face in the coming months is from the Layer 2 protocols built on Ethereum as they also address the same problem that Ethereum users face and which Solana is looking to resolve. They also provide fast transfers and low gas fees, something that Solana also seeks to do. So, with so many networks competing with each other for the same use case, it is going to be a difficult race as the network seeks to make use of the same set of development teams and users.
Rather than focus on the same set of crypto users who are already there in the crypto ecosystem, these new networks would be well served by seeking to expand to the mainstream user base by building platforms and applications that would bring in the users who aren’t currently in the ecosystem as that is where the further growth in the coming years is going to be. The network that actively encourages users beyond the current crypto ecosystem is likely to be the one that is going to stand the test of time.
