With the flurry of exchange platforms in the cryptocurrency industry, finding one which gives you complete control over your digital assets can prove to be a tough task. Especially after considering the recent spike in instances of exchanges going bankrupt and constant allegations of wash trading and inflation of trading volume. However, with Digitex Futures, traders and investors can rest assured that their digital assets are in safe hands.
What is Digitex Futures?
The Digitex Futures exchange is a hybrid exchange platform that enables traders to trade futures contracts backed by cryptocurrencies, commodities, and other assets.
At the time of writing, Digitex’s native token, DGTX, comfortably sits at 65th position on CoinMarketCap crypto table, trading at $0.126 per token with a market cap of $93.1 million. The DGTX token works as the fuel to execute transactions on the zero-commission, decentralized exchange.
BlockchainReporter recently got the opportunity to interview Adam Todd, the CEO and Founder of Digitex Futures. The interview revolves around questions pertaining to the exchange, including the utility of the exchange’s DGTX token, and what separates Digitex from its competition, among others.
The Interview
BR: What’s the utility of Digitex’s DGTX token? Can you substantiate a little on that?
Digitex: The DGTX exchange token is unique among exchanges since it is the only way that traders can access our platform. All trades take place in DGTX and all account balances are denominated in DGTX.
It is through this model that we can offer traders a commission-free trading environment. It’s quite simple. The more traders that flock to our platform for commission-free trading, the greater the demand, and the higher the price of the token.
We’ve created a win-win situation for everyone since we’re not siphoning liquidity out of the pool in the form of commission fees. There is no mechanical edge against traders either. Our interests are actually aligned with our users since we want the same thing: the price to go up.
While token appreciation is the ultimate goal, this is not how the exchange makes money, we can make money if the token stays the same price because we’re sustainable even if the price doesn’t always go up.
We make money from minting a small number of new tokens each year and the inflationary cost of that is offset by demand for the token from traders who must buy it to participate in our liquid, commission-free markets.
So far, DGTX, like BNB and other exchange tokens has proven its great potential for ROI. This makes it attractive not only for traders as a utility/exchange token but also for investors as it generates returns.
One example of this is when the whole crypto market plummeted towards the end of last year. BTC hit its record low of 3193 on 15th December 2018. DGTX recorded its low two days earlier @ .0310 (which was still 300% up from ICO). BTC gained 67.7% since then, while DGTX has gained 400% since then
Holding DGTX also allows traders to participate in community votes. To ensure that we can continue to offer commission-free trading in the long term, we propose to mint a small number of tokens starting from 2021.
This may have an inflationary effect on the token price, however, this will be offset by more traders coming to the platform. Moreover, it is the Digitex community who votes on when we mint tokens, so they have control over how much and when the inflation will be.
BR: What separates Digitex Futures exchange from its competition?
Digitex: There are so many things that separate Digitex from the competition! But let’s start with probably the two most important ones. We are a commission-free exchange, we charge no fees whatsoever for people to use our platform.
Moreover, we are working on becoming a hybrid exchange with non-custodial accounts. This means that unlike most other exchanges, we will never have control of your funds. We will not be able to interfere with any trades or users accounts, nor will we be a target for hackers.
As I mentioned, since we are not trading against our users, we can honestly say that we care about our traders and want the same thing. We want them to be successful, we want them to attract more people to the platform and we want the price to rise. We’re probably the only exchange whose interests are aligned with our users.
Unlike other exchanges, we are a futures exchange. We’ll be starting out with BTC futures and adding LTC and ETH futures, but we will also be adding traditional futures markets as well. This will give crypto traders exposure to the trillion-dollar futures markets and traditional markets like forex, gold, and commodities that they’ve never had access to before.
We’re also planning to attract traditional retail traders over into the crypto world since, for the first time, they can trade their favorite markets, tech stocks, indices, etc. completely commission-free.
We’re all about pushing the boundary and Digitex is the first exchange to be integrating Ethereum’s scaling solution Plasma into the back end to allow for decentralized accounts. We’re working closely with Matter Inc, who work directly with Vitalik and Poon and were approached to be their first use case. It was a no-brainer for us.
We’ve got some of the best developer talents in the industry working with us and our marketing team is one of the best I’ve ever seen. We’ve already amassed a group of 70K traders on Telegram and have 1.2 million people signed up to our waitlist waiting for the launch on April 30. We saw how high demand for our project was in January 2018 when we held our ICO. It sold out in 17 minutes. And it’s been amazing watching that demand and interest in our project growing since then.
We’re going to be disrupting the futures market, the exchange market and also bringing a lightning-fast one-click trading ladder interface that will change the way people trade for good. We’re also adding spot trading later in the year and that will be commission-free as well. So, there are a million things to get excited about here and that make Digitex stand out from the rest.
BR: With the recent rise in exchange hacks, how does Digitex’s security mechanism function?
Digitex: Security is very important to us. Unlike other exchanges, the safety of our customers’ funds is one of the basic tenets of the way the exchange is designed. You can see this in the original whitepaper. So security for us isn’t an add-on after-thought.
With other exchanges, you have to trust them with your funds. Our plan is for accounts to become totally non-custodial, which means that the exchange doesn’t have access to our customers’ wallets. When that’s the case, what’s the point in hacking the exchange?
Beyond that, we’re following industry practices to be as secure as possible within the company, and pro-actively fighting scammers and misinformation. During the recent fake USDDex.io ICO, it was Digitex’s actions that got the domain, and hence their whole project, taken down. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the scammers from raking in a significant amount of money.
BR: Integration of Ethereum’s Plasma protocol with Digitex sounds interesting. Can you explain what benefits it brings along?
Digitex: We’re really excited about it! As I said, we were personally approached by Matter Inc. to be their first exchange use case for Plasma. At the moment, you have two types of exchanges, centralized and decentralized.
Most exchanges are centralized since they can work much faster and more reliable, offering users real-time benefits. The problem with centralized exchanges as you mentioned before is that they hold on to use funds and there are so many cases of hacks, or even founders passing away with the only knowledge of the location of the cold storage wallets like QuadrigaCX, if you believe that story.
The point is, you have to trust them with your money, which is adding in an unnecessary layer into a trustless technology. Digitex when it first launches will be centralized, simply because the full integration of Plasma is still in testing and isn’t quite ready yet.
But when it is, we will offer our users all the benefits of centralized servers for speed and usability with the security of a DEX. They won’t have to deal with clunky, low volume decentralized exchanges and they won’t have to trust us with their money.
And to give you an idea of how fast a Plasma side chain is, it can process transactions at 25,000 TPS–some 1,500 times faster than the Ethereum blockchain. Plasma is going to be a game changer for Ethereum, and ETH is going to explode as soon as it gets its scaling issues under control.
BR: What are some developments in the pipeline for Digitex that our readers should be aware of?
Digitex: Well, for sure, the upcoming launch on April 30th. That’s going to be massive. It will be our chance to deliver what we’ve been promising since our ICO. Before the launch, I will be speaking at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit, so anyone who wants to come down and see me there can hear more about what we’ve been building and the impact we believe that Digitex will have on the market.
If any of your readers haven’t signed up to our waitlist, they still have time to win free DGTX until April 20th. They can read more about that on our website, but the top prizes are 100K DGTX for the top 10 winners and 1000 DGTX for the top 5,000.
Beyond the launch, we’ve got masses of plans, some of them I can reveal now, others we’ll be announcing later on in the year. But, I can tell you that we will be launching a mobile app soon after launch, spot trading, adding additional markets, and of course, will be rolling out the Plasma.
Join our Telegram group if you want to know more, we’re always throwing new ideas and plans out there, so people who want to keep on top of what we’re doing and when should stay up on our socials.