In the face of the menacing DEX, CEX has begun to actively seek change in this decentralization boom.
Written by: Allenlonely
From the initial single spot trading of individual currencies, to the rapid expansion of the number of supported currencies with the development of the market, to the addition of various futures products such as reverse and forward, as well as more derivatives such as options and even new currencies With the launch of various financial wealth management products represented by mining, cryptocurrency exchanges have experienced a series of “from simple to complex” in just a few years. While serving market participants, they have also grown into The traffic hub of the entire cryptocurrency world.
However, this summer DEX took advantage of the explosive growth of DeFi Dongfeng to make centralized exchanges really feel the sense of crisis. DEX represented by Uniswap has achieved nearly 10 times increase in trading volume in just a few months. In response to the raging decentralization boom, centralized exchanges have begun to seek change. Under this background, OKEx has made a “transition from simple to complex” and then “complicated to simple”. Choice-unified account.
The birth of OKEx unified account
As the industry progresses, the shortcomings of the cryptocurrency trading platform system are gradually revealed. Due to technical limitations and complex calculation logic, the accounts of different product lines of the current cryptocurrency trading platform are independent and are not shared. Only the account level classification includes fund accounts, currency accounts, currency leverage accounts, delivery contract accounts, and perpetual accounts. There are six categories of contract accounts and option contract accounts.
This leads to two problems. One is the low utilization of funds. For example, if you hold multiple currencies such as BTC, USDT, and LTC at the same time, the system cannot pass the contract transaction on the exchange. Automatic borrowing of coins is used as margin, and only the balance of a single currency that has been transferred to a specific account can be used as margin, which results in a large number of other tokens corresponding to the spot position of funds cannot be effectively used. Because of this, in the event of extreme market conditions, users are likely to be forced to liquidate their positions because they cannot transfer a specific currency into the contract account to increase the margin in the first time. The large amount of funds in the account cannot be used to increase leverage. The “protection” function of contract positions.
The second is that the classification of various accounts is not friendly enough for users who are new to the market and who use the exchange for the first time. Users often find that there is no balance in the account for trading after recharging. It is only from the legal currency deposit to the contract opening. It requires multiple links of operation, which often takes quite a while for users who are not yet familiar with the function.
The OKEx unified account is designed to solve these pain points. The new function allows all funds in the account to be effectively pooled. There is no need to transfer operations during different types of transactions, and the realization of cross-currency margin can be obvious Improve the efficiency of capital utilization and make the experience more friendly to users of leveraged contract trading.
OKEx Unified Account Public Test Usage Guide
At present, OKEx has opened a public test of the unified account on the official website. Users can experience the functions of the unified account after logging in. If you have any questions about the new system, you can also conduct a simulated trading test through the official simulation channel provided by OKEx, which is more in-depth Learn about the new features of the unified account. The author will use the official simulated trading environment as a reference, and make a comprehensive comparison with the traditional account presentation, and take you to a comprehensive understanding of OKEx’s unified account function.
After logging in to the official website and selecting the unified account mode to start simulated trading, the account in the simulated environment will automatically obtain some virtual assets for testing.
Let’s first compare the interface of the new and old accounts:
As you can see, the old version of the asset page has six ledger accounts, while the new version of the unified account model has only one account, and funds are shared between all accounts.
OKEx’s unified account is divided into three modes: simple trading mode, single currency margin mode and cross-currency margin mode. The three modes meet the trading needs of different users.
Enter the trading page, first experience the simple trading mode, which is only applicable to currency trading and option buyers. Enter the currency trading interface, you can directly conduct transactions without the need for transfer operations.
If you want to trade futures contracts, you need to use the other two modes. Take the single currency margin mode as an example, click the settings in the upper right corner:
Then click Account Mode Settings
This page can switch the account to the single currency margin mode. It is worth mentioning that if you want to open the second and third modes, you need to understand the risks of these two modes. You can upgrade after passing the web version of the “exam” use. The purpose of the “exam” is mainly to prompt risk. The third question in the following figure is an example. If you choose the full position mode, if the position of a certain currency as margin is forced to liquidate, it will affect all of the currency under the unified account Equity, this is quite different from the simple model without the risk of liquidation.
In contract trading, you can actively set the position-by-position or full-position mode. In the warehouse-by-warehouse mode, the margin can be isolated from the unified account, and you need to manually add margin in the page. In the full position mode, there is no option to add margin. Therefore, in this mode, the margin of the contract position is directly related to all funds in the account, that is, all positions of the currency in the exchange account will be regarded as risk margin. Although more sufficient margin reserves under this setting will reduce the risk of liquidation in most cases, once liquidation occurs in abnormal fluctuations, users will suffer greater losses. This risk cannot be ignored.
In addition to single currency margin, there is another cross-currency margin mode setting. It should be noted that the two margin modes cannot be switched when there are still open contract positions.
The cross-currency margin model is relatively difficult to understand, but it is the model that best reflects the value of a unified account. After entering this mode and turning on the automatic borrowing function, the currencies other than the assets corresponding to the opened positions will be converted into U.S. dollars according to the amount of currency held_USD index price_conversion discount discount, and counted as available funds.
The following figure is an example. After opening the currency transaction page, you can find that although the USDT balance in the unified account is only 25,000, in the currency transaction without leverage, you can still directly buy the amount of BTC equivalent to 90,000 USDT, and this It is the result that can be achieved after using other assets to automatically borrow coins as mentioned above.
This means that “senior” investors can swap positions for all assets in the account with one click, or the difficulty of closing all positions in the account with one click will also be greatly reduced. The only thing to note is that currency borrowing transactions will generate borrowing interest, and borrowing multiple currencies at the same time will incur a certain cost. You need to be psychologically prepared for this part of the cost before performing this operation.
What can a unified account bring
Compared with before, the unified account has the following advantages. First, the efficiency of capital utilization has been improved . In the previous trading system, if the user holds multiple currencies, the system cannot use automatic borrowing as a margin in contract transactions on the exchange, but can only use a single currency that has been transferred to a specific account The balance is used as a margin, which results in a large amount of funds corresponding to the spot positions of other tokens that cannot be effectively used. In the cross-currency margin mode of a unified account, multiple currencies can automatically borrow coins from each other, effectively increasing the margin rate. At the same time, it can also meet the needs of users for cross-market hedging transactions.
Second, the increase in margin rate also reduces the risk of liquidation . In the event of extreme market conditions, users do not need to manually transfer a specific currency into the contract account to increase the margin, and other types of funds in the account can be the first Time automatically borrow coins to ensure that the margin rate is above the strong position line. Can play a “protection” role for the leveraged contract positions. The automatic currency borrowing function can automatically borrow other currencies to increase the margin rate. At the same time, if you don’t want to use all currencies as margin at the same time, you can also set up a warehouse-by-warehouse model to freely weigh risks.
The third is to simplify the original transaction. In the past, it was necessary to manually add or reduce the margin in each contract, which resulted in low capital efficiency and cumbersome operations. But now there is no need to allocate funds, share the margin, improve the efficiency of capital utilization, and reduce the friction cost generated by a series of processes in the transaction process .
In addition to simplifying the original trading account and supporting shared margin, the unified account can also achieve real-time liquidation, and users can withdraw profits after closing their positions. There is no need to wait for the unified settlement at 4 pm every day. It also further improved the capital utilization rate.
In addition to the product function itself, the experience improvement brought by the unified account for futures contract investors is quite obvious, which will greatly help the conversion of potential users in this field and the promotion of the enthusiasm of users who have entered the market. Take the mature traditional financial market as an example. At present, the total market value of the global stock market is one hundred billion US dollars, while the scale of the financial derivatives market exceeds one trillion US dollars. This shows that the derivatives market is compared with the spot market. In terms of imagination space is more impressive.
CoinGecko data shows that the current spot in the cryptocurrency market is not much different from the futures contract with the largest proportion in the derivatives market. It can be foreseen that the rapid development of crypto derivatives in the past few years is actually just getting started. OKEx’s leading position in the total open interest of bitcoin futures contracts allows the value of the unified account function upgrade to be effectively used, and the new function upgrade will also have a certain promotion effect on the drainage of platform futures contract transactions.
When some centralized exchanges are still suffering from the potential diversion impact that DEX can bring, OKEx quickly refocused its attention on the biggest advantage front of centralized exchanges compared to decentralized exchanges-futures contracts On top of that, seeking product upgrades based on the pain points common to current mainstream exchanges may trigger a new round of reshuffle in the crypto derivatives market.
Although DEX has achieved considerable growth in the past year, in the field of futures contracts, the performance bottleneck on the chain and the high cost of frequent contract calls make DEX always “daunt” this, even if the development of Layer 2 can solve it Some problems, but the security risks of smart contracts and the stability of DeFi Lego components after extreme market conditions will still affect the flow of funds in the market. The functional upgrade of the OKEx unified account has further widened the gap between the “sweet spot” of centralized exchanges in futures contract trading and decentralized exchanges. The futures derivatives market will still be dominated by CEX in a short time game.
