Globe & EncryptClub AMA
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: The cryptocurrency derivatives trading has become a very heavyweight sector in the current crypto market. As a rising star of the sector, Globe insists on providing users with fairer and frictionless trading service. Thougth an institutional-grade platfrom, Globe shares a similar origin to UniSwap and is built by two former traders and digital asset technologists. At the time, it’s running smoothly and aims to build a “Coinbase for derivatives”.
With the matching risk engine Thor, Globe performs as well as NASDAQ in latency and throughput, being the first perpetual futures trading platfrom supporting microsecond-grade latency in the current crypto market. With its products, Golbe assists with traders to manage their assets easily in a very professional way.
Most of all, Globe’s knowledge on regulation allows its business to meet CFTC’s (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) requirements on compliance, insurance and security. It obeys The Bank Secrecy Act and Anti-money laundering rules, and puts all BTC in multi-signature cold wallet which could be sotred offline and not be stealed by hackers. Today, James, the founder and CEO of Globe come to EncryptClub community and will share more about this project with us.
Welcome to EncryptClub, James! Would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
James：I’m James, CEO at Globe, I grew up in Cambridge (UK) and later studied at the university there working in pure math (Langlands programme).
I later moved to London and finished a PhD in statistics/machine learning there in a year or two before I left academia to work in finance. I used to run the quant team at a hedge fund for a few years until I realized that crypto trading / market making was a greater opportunity than anything else that the hedge fund was involved with
I founded Globe together with a friend of mine from university to build the exchange we believed crypto needed having been traders. The rest of the team are spread across the globe from Thailand to India, China, and across Europe and the Americas. The engineering part of the group tends to be from exchange engineering teams at banks or high frequency trading, and our community side goes back to the earliest days of crypto
Q1:What kind of exchange is Globe?
James: Globe is the derivatives exchange pioneering new trading products like VIX futures, it is also creating a safer and better place to trade perpetual futures when markets get volatile and has a native exchange token called GDT.
Many other exchanges trade on their own exchange which means ordinary traders often get scammed by “Bart Simpson” patterns, or their “cancel” orders are ignored or worse. We are stopping that!
We’ve also seen big crashes on exchanges because of poor risk management liquidating entirely solvent customers, so we have made special adjustments to our risk engines to keep markets safer
We introduced the first bitcoin VIX futures and published research on them — open source with data too at https://github.com/globe-research! We are also pioneering sports futures, defi options, and more
We go to great lengths to make our trading experience easy to use and fun, with new features all the time, e.g. easily order entry direct on tradingview
We’re also the only (?) derivatives exchange allowing you to make orders down the websocket instead of pushing that to the REST endpoints making API trading so much easier
Globe is also the first crypto exchange since coinbase that Y Combinator and Tim Draper have backed, and also count Pantera Capital, OKEX (Block Dream), MXC, gate.io, and many others as partners or investors — there are over 200 now so I can’t list them all!
Q2：How does Globe facilitate our trading? What convenience Globe can bring to us?
James：Exchanges are constantly breaking when you need them most, their matching engines often overwhelmed by a tiny fraction of what traditional finance / “tradfi” deals with. We built Globe looking towards a future where crypto and “tradfi” merge into one, to offer greater capability in terms of matching / TPS and scaling.
To keep the exchange working when you need it, we took a lot of the best ideas from high frequency trading and leading traditional exchanges together with some of our own innovations — like working out how to deal with sending trade market data across the cloud when it exceeds 10 million trades/s, or getting orders quickly across different parts of the world.
We currently benchmark at about 5x faster than NASDAQ in latency, with burst messages per second around 15M, and 100k+ simultaneous API connections (about 5x bitmex), putting us in a great place to handle the next bull run
It certainly wasn’t fun last time around when cancels were ignored, or only one type of order could get through!
More than that we are the only place currently to trade VIX futures (just on our testnet until the token sale), and will continue to be the first and only place to trade new products on our roadmap. Innovative products and excellent trading experiene are essential for derivative exchanges, in my opinion.
Q3：As the important governance token on the trading platform, what is the role, function and usage of GBT?
James：There are many upsides for GDT holders, most importantly discounted trading fees. The more tokens a user holds, the greater their discounts, which comes in handy given how fast fees can accumulate when executing a high-frequency strategy. Users can look forward to additional utility post-launch, such as staking rewards and more
The token also operates a buy and burn (“BNB”) style mechanic.
Q4：Born in the current DeFi bull market, which features of Globe are combined with the current DeFi background?
James：Now is a great boom time for crypto, and there is an important role for Globe to play in it. DeFi is doing something really important in unlocking one of the great uses of money as a source of yield. Normally if you get any yield from a bank at all, they pocket half of it before you get anything at all!
We have an important role to play here in making it much easier to get that yield and enrich defi with derivatives markets.
Looking further ahead, we think of Markowitz dream in his 1952 “Modern portfolio theory” works — to unlock global alpha for everyone — making global finance more efficient for ordinary people and increasing how much can be traded by traders.
In the meantime there are lots of important products that need to be made now that we’re working on, ready for the next great wave…
We’re glad to hear how many people are excited about VIX, and how many want polkadot options, or soccer league futures, or even just 1-click access to defi yield returns with safe, insured cold storage custody. but most importantly we want to keep hearing what our community wants and deliver it to them fast!
Q5：As a trading platform, Globe needs to attach great importance to the security of user funds. What strategies does Globe adopt to keep users’ asset safety?
James：We hold our user’s assets in safe, insured cold storage custody. We use an institutional provider so our users funds are safe no matter what happens to the team. We also have an insurance fund built from our GDT token sales, from our unsold token supply and from trading on the exchange
There will also be additional incentives around insurance fund staking rolled out for GDT holders, to reward stakers, and insurance funds traded on the exchange
Here comes free QA session, guests can choose 1–2 questions to reply.
User1: How to get Globe token GDT?
James: We’ll announce the details soon! Our telegram group https://t.me/globeofficial and twitter https://twitter.com/globedx will have the details. Most likely you’ll be able to get in via an IDO/IEO offering or buy directly on the exchange https://globedx.com
User2: Is Globe centralized or decentralized? What’s the key point to get new users？
James: Globe is centralized. I think there are lots of key points:
* New products are a part of it, but having the best perpetuals is really important
* Having an API that supports algo trading properly
* Having great liquidity: since we have 21 market makers in the token presale and some institutional players in the equity sale we are helping add new liquidity to crypto markets
* Building trust and respect with markets: no trading against customers means market makers trust us and want to be on globe, as do professional traders
One big secret: listening to our community and making things they find helpful quickly!
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: Thank James for joining our AMA and sharing so much valuable information with us. Thank you all for watching this AMA. EncryptClub will work hard and bring more wonderful content for you in future.
