On Tuesday (February 4), digital asset exchange Binance announced that its futures trading platform, Binance Futures, which went live in September 2019, is launching a ZEC/USDT perpetual contract.
Here is how Binance Info describes Zcash:
“ZCash is a privacy driven cryptocurrency. It uses the Equihash as an algorithm, which is an asymmetric memory-hard Proof of Work algorithm based on the generalized birthday problem. It relies on high RAM requirements to bottleneck the generation of proofs and making ASIC development unfeasible.
“ZCash uses zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to ensure that all information (sender, receiver, amount) is encrypted, without the possibility of double-spending. The only information that is revealed regarding transactions is the time in which they take place.”
The new product is being launched at 08:00 (UTC) on 5 February 2020.
According to Binance’s announcement, “to prevent market manipulation, Binance will implement a pricing limit of ±1% on the mark price within the first 30 minutes after trading starts.”
Also, it is worth keeping in mind that, as with the DASH/USDT perpetual contract, which was announced yesterday, “perpetual contracts on Binance Futures are similar to the trading pairs on the spot market,” and they are “priced and settled in the same manner.”
Binance Futures users will be able to choose between 1x and 50x leverage.
Here are some of the main specifications for the contract:
- Base Asset: ZEC
- Quote Asset: USDT
- Settlement Asset: USDT
- Contract Unit: 1 ZEC
- Tick Size: 0.01 USDT
- Minimum Contract Quantity: 0.001
- Maximum Contract Quantity: 10,000
- Base Initial Margin Rate: 2.00%
- Base Maintenance Margin Rate: 1.00%
- Liquidation Fee: 0.5%
The other twelve perpetual contracts being offered by Binance Futures are BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, BCH/USDT, XRP/USDT, EOS/USDT, LTC/USDT, TRX/USDT, ETC/USDT, LINK/USDT, XLM/USDT, ADA/USDT, and DASH/USDT.
Perhaps, it is not surprising that yesterday and today Binance has announced perpetual contracts both Dash and Zcash since these two privacy-focused coins are two of the best-performing cryptoassets so far in 2020 with return-on-investment (ROI) figures of +172.17% and +129.73% against USD respectively.
Last Tuesday (January 28), the Electric Coin Company (ECC) announced via a blog post that the Zcash Foundation had polled the Zcash community about how development of the Zcash protocol should be funded and that the community had “voted to create a new development fund with 20 percent of the mining rewards, while the miners receive 80 percent as of block 1046400” and that, assuming the Zcash Foundation agrees, this decision will be implemented in November 2020 (to coincide with the first scheduled Zcash block reward halving).
The blog post explained that the reason the Zcash community was asked how it wanted development to be funded was that the original “Founder’s Reward” scheme (started when Zcash was launched in 2016) — which distributed Zcash mining rewards 80% to miners, 15% to investors and founders, and 5% to ECC — expires in November 2020, and until now, it was not clear how future Zcash support and development would get funded.
Here’s what the Zcash community has decided:
Featured Image Courtesy of Binance. Pie Chart Courtesy of Electric Coin Company.
