• Binance API now includes support for margin trading – though such trading is not (yet) available
• The change implies that margin trading will be added to the platform
• Binance has made no official announcement as of now

Despite regulations being put in place to restrict margin trading in places like Japan, Binance seems to be making the move to introduce it onto their platform.

While no official announcement has been made about this development, at March 20th, a Reddit post showed that some changes have been made to Binance’s public Application Programming Interface (API) that might indicate that they are to introduce margin trading at some time in the future.

This isn’t the only interesting new change that has come to Binance in the last few weeks as they have also announced that they will facilitate the sale of bitcoin in Australia through newsagents.

Changes to the API

The post that revealed this new development showed that an update that took place in the Binance public API response has created some differences from that of the official documentation released by the company on GitHub.

The differences in question are two Boolean variables which are “isSpotTradingAllowed,” and “isMarginTradingAllowed.” The variables are rather self-explanatory and could be a sign of new things to come. For now, isSpotTradingAllowed is set to true, meaning it is enabled and isMarginTradingAllowed is set to false, meaning it is disabled and this applies to all 482 Binance trading pairs.

While Binance hasn’t given an official date of these changes being implemented on their platform, they have spoken about this previously in their whitepaper. According to the whitepaper, Binance intends to introduce margin trading after spot trading but before futures trading.

News of this sent users into a frenzy of excitement when these changes are implemented, Binance will join the ranks of other exchanges such as OkEx and Bitfinex that already offer this to their customers.

A polarizing idea – especially with regulators

While users might be excited about the prospect of margin trading on Binance, it is important to remember why margin trading is so controversial in the first place.

Margin trading refers to a situation in which a loan is taken by an investor from a broker to invest in an asset and the amount is borrowed against the value of the asset. In some cases, investors would borrow at up to 40 times the value of the asset, which has led to sanctions being put on the practice.