Interview: Digitex Futures CEO Talks on Future of Platform

In a recent interview with Bitcoinist, the CEO and founder of Digitex Futures, Adam Todd spoke about the project’s waiting list, hybrid model as well as loads of other subjects. We found the interview interesting so here are some of the highlights.

One of the questions Todd was asked, was how Digitex is unique and how it’s different from everything out there.

“It’s a commission-free futures exchange and by the end of quarter three, will also be non-custodial. With just those two factors, you can see how unique the exchange is. Traders don’t have to pay commissions and they don’t have to trust us with their funds.

We’re also going to be offering traditional futures markets like Forex, tech stocks, indices, gold, and commodities. This will give crypto traders massive exposure to the trillion-dollar futures industry and the chance to speculate on entirely new markets. It will also give traditional retail traders a bridge to cross over into crypto while trading on the markets that they are familiar with.

I think another really key differentiator is that we can really say that we are an exchange whose interests are aligned with its users. Unlike exchanges that trade against its traders and siphon liquidity out of the pool in the form of commission fees, we both want token appreciation.

There is no mechanical edge against traders and, by removing the commission fees, we allow short-term, high-frequency traders the chance to actually make a living at what they do best–in a way they can’t on fee-charging exchanges.”

Todd was also asked on how he was able to get around 1.5 million people queuing up in the waiting list:

“Well, it’s just a really great product that sells itself! Who doesn’t want commission-free trading? No, seriously, of course, it’s one thing to have a great product, but another to make sure that people hear about it. I won’t lie, we have a really excellent marketing team at Digitex! We started the waitlist campaign back in August, so it has had quite some time to build up such high numbers.

We used viral marketing and incentivized users through a waitlist competition. Users had to sign up and get a referral code and then pass that on to their trader friends. The more referrals that they made, the higher they went up in the queue. The top 10 winners each get 10K DGTX and the top 5,000 get 1000 DGTX airdropped into their accounts to trade with. As you can imagine, as the price has been rising, so were the stakes of the competition. 100K DGTX has been worth as much as $16,000 at its highest point.”

The topic then moved onto the exchange’s hybrid model and the Plasma integration to which Todd responded:

“We are working alongside the Ethereum-approved Matter Inc. developer team to integrate Plasma into the backend. This will allow for decentralized account balances, meaning that Digitex won’t be able to ever tamper with customer funds. It also means that it won’t be a target for hackers and that it is a non-custodial exchange, coming in the third quarter of this year.

We are one of the first projects to implement the Plasma Protocol, which was originally described by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in their whitepaper. We’re extremely proud to be part of Ethereum’s scaling solution and when they approached us to be one of their first use cases, we jumped at the chance. Our developers have already achieved 25,000 transactions per second, which is 1500x faster than the Ethereum main chain.”

Speaking on the future of the platform, Todd said:

“We’ve got a ton of plans for the exchange and can’t wait for it to launch. In the very nearest term, we will be onboarding the first users to the exchange on April 30 and announcing the winners of the waitlist contest on May 1. We will be launching with one market (BTC) to start with and then very quickly adding more crypto markets including ETH and LTC and traditional futures markets as well, as I mentioned above.

We will be moving from 10x leverage to 100x leverage and then also launching commission-free spot trading around quarter three. This will be really exciting as, by doing this, we will be opening up the exchange to potentially hundreds of thousands (or maybe more!) new traders. This will have an impact on the DGTX price and also on the way that people trade.

You see, most people are not used to trading with our one-click ladder interface. Once they start trading with the ladder, they won’t want to go back. It is so much simpler and easier to trade with one mouse click and to visualize the price action going up and down all the time.

So, we will be basically expanding the user base and building out our exchange.”

Read the full interview here.