What is Giant.Exchange
Giant.Exchange is a decentralized binary options exchange. To understand its work, let’s first review what options are, how they are related to digital currencies and take a look at the overall market state.
Binary options
Classic call options allow to buy a financial asset in the future at a current price. Common put options give the right to sell a financial asset later. This means that call options are beneficial for those expecting the growth of asset, while put option would come in handy for those who suspect that the asset price is going to drop soon. Traditional one-touch options are made when a trader is betting on a certain price that the market will see in a set date. Contrariwise, no touch options open up an opportunity to bet that the price is not going to reach certain values.Binary options differ from usual options by the fact that they do not revolve around buy-and-sell deals - they are focused on betting on the asset price dynamics in a time point set in the contract. Trades get either a revenue described in the contract or nothing at all. Thus, as long as everybody plays fair, the binary options revenue directly depends on the experience, on the knowledge how to analyze price jumps and on the elementary financial competence of the traders.Three following types of binary options will be available on Giant:
- Call and put options. Betting on the price fixed in a certain time point. Example: a user thinks that the asset will grow in price at a specified future date and invests in a call option (or in a put option if he thinks that the asset price will drop).
- One-touch and no-touch options. Betting on the price fixed in a time point specified by a broker. Example: a user believes that Bitcoin will reach $8000 by August 11 and bets on this event (one-touch), while another user thinks that Bitcoin will not reach $8000 and makes a corresponding bet (no-touch).
- In options and out options. Betting on the price corridor made in a time point set by a broker. Example: a user is sure that Bitcoin will fluctuate between $6000 and $7000 from 8 August to 8 September 2018, and bets that this will happen.
The overriding advantage of binary options against direct asset trading is that users do not work with the said assets straight. Instead, they create contracts that only use assets as a reference. Indirect work with digital financial assets equals less risk for traders. The best illustration for this is the addition of Bitcoin futures to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange - despite the move, both organizations do not plan to introduce direct cryptocurrency trading anytime soon.That said, binary options have their own dark side: some platforms were caught manipulating with contracts, they were also deliberately attracting users to get as much money as they can off them and in some cases, they have committed identity theft. This is the exact reason why the financial regulators of one of the most influential financial centers of the world - the USA - are recommending to be vigilant for those traders who decided to work in this sphere. Unfair brokers do not provide a clear information on assets which leads to traders’ financial losses. This aside, no funds safety is guaranteed. Can blockchain change this situation? Giant is confident that the answer is “yes”.
What does Giant.Exchange offer its customers
After studying the cryptocurrency space, Giant developers have concluded that this market indeed contains little to no reliable offerings. As a response, Giant.Exchange is now being built. On this blockchain platform, every binary option is a smart contract and the price reference data is provided by a separate special smart contract called ‘Oracle’, which, in turn, works with the exchange price aggregators, such as Coinmarketcap and CryptoCompare. Both these services are regularly used as Bitcoin and altcoins’ price sources in the reports by the most trustworthy financial media outlets. Price aggregators which tell about the financial status of the asset on several exchanges are providing a much more reliable information that the data coming only from one platform. You can find out more about the connection of two crucial elements of Giant.Exchange (‘Binary Option’ and ‘Oracle’ smart contracts) and check out the samples of their source code in the Giant.Exchange White Paper.
Giant.Exchange economy
The exchange budgetary revenues will not be made by exploiting the financial inexperience of traders. Instead, options’ creation fees will be the main source of income. The fee size will directly depend on the position of your option on the list of all offerings. This radically differs from the approach when binary options brokers are making money off trade margins and work with traders having only this parameter in mind. From the beginning, the Giant team was making a structure in which it doesn’t have any exclusive privileges in comparison to usual owners of masternodes. It is particularly important that the budget of exchange will be protected by the ‘Giant.Exchange’ smart contract in which the funds withdrawal restriction is prohibited. In other words, if any hackers actually assume control over the budget, they will not be able to transfer it to other accounts and swiftly disappear. In addition, the system of user reputation will seriously hamper the work of fraudsters.Just as many other projects, the blockchain environment of Giant offers its own unified digital financial asset - Giant Coin (exchange abbreviation GIC). Giant Coin will be used as a single payment system in all projects based on the Giant technology. Currently the coin is based on Proof-of-Work, the move to Proof-of-Stake will happen in the near future. The cryptocurrency network is managed by nodes and masternodes. An investor must have 1000 GIC to launch a masternode. This sum will pay off in a short period of 2-3 months. 80% of block reward will be sent to the masternode owner. Moreover, one investor can own several masternodes at the same time. The technical properties of this cryptocurrency are also provided on our website. We have already reached a listing agreement with two exchanges - Crypto-Bridge and Graviex.Net. In the near future, we plan to list it on Cryptopia, HitBTC and KuCoin. Although the asset emission will not be limited, the burning of transaction fees will prevent hyperinflation. The proof of the efficiency of this measure can be checked in our dedicated article.
Assets
Binary options are planned to be created on the basis of the following digital financial assets pairs:
- BTC/USD
- ETH/BTC
- ETH/USD
- XRP/BTC
- XRP/USD
- LTC/BTC
- LTC/USD
- DASH/BTC
- DASH/USD
- BCH/BTC
- BCH/USD
- GIC/BTC
Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) и Ripple (XRP) are the most popular cryptocurrencies on the market which is best illustrated by the order of their addition to Bloomberg terminals.It is important to note that this list of digital assets is not final: the structure of Giant.Exchange is flexible enough to add a contract revolving around the digital asset which simply did not exist during the first versions of the platform. The information regarding this asset will be provided by the new ‘Oracle’ contract referring to the API of respected market aggregators or exchanges.
Governance system
The decentralized management of Giant.Exchange is best shown by the fact that both common users and masternode owners make decisions about the further development of the platform - for instance, about which assets deserve to be added and which do not. Giant aside, masternode governance can be met in the structure of the popular cryptocurrency Dash. Despite this, Dash doesn’t support smart contracts, and this technology model found in Ethereum does not fully meet the requirements of the Giant team. In a notable example, Ethereum does not allow to delete smart contracts, while in Giant, old smart contracts of binary options from the distant past will be deleted to optimize the system. More on Giant pros and cons can be read in a separate materialwhich also includes an illustrative comparison table of GIC and other similar digital currencies. Users also can take part in the work on the project internal structure. Masternode owners will be able to watch the building of the new components of Giant.Exchange and influence the process. We are also welcoming towards the experienced users able to create new ‘Oracle’ smart contracts which provide data in cryptocurrency prices and market status. In Giant documents, ‘Oracle’ smart contracts are often mentioned, but the aforementioned blockchain engineers are also sometimes called oracles. They will be able to swiftly establish the channel of info on any new asset. There is a critical condition: every oracle and broker proposing changes must be a masternode owner.
Giant future
As you have witnessed above, the opportunity to wager is one of the hallmarks of binary options. Giant developers plan to use the experience of Giant.Exchange creation for the next project that will operate with sports bets - Giant.Bet. The Giant Contract technology is already confirmed to be present in Giant.Bet. More on this solution can be seen in the Giant Contracts White Paper.We would like to remind about the Giant Airdrop that will be commenced at the initial stages of the platform. You must simply register on the Giant.Exchange website and await an email notification. First 100 of users who activated their accounts at the release day will receive 100 GIC. Giant.Exchange Beta will be published on 1 October 2018. Follow the news on our website and on the project’s Discord channel to keep up with the latest announcements.
Summary
- Binary options are contracts which allow to bet on the digital asset price motion. The market of binary options is overrun with fraud schemes.
- Giant.Exchange offers to play fair on this market by opening contracts about the dynamics of the most popular digital currencies. The main source of Giant.Exchange budgetary revenue is the contracts creation fee.
- The Giant blockchain which embodies the best from Ethereum and Dash has its own financial asset Giant Coin (GIC). Giant Airdrop is planned for the first hundred of registered Giant.Exchange accounts.
- The main reasons for calling Giant.Exchange a decentralized platform: the trader reputation system, the automated presentation of data from financial assets price aggregators and votes on exchange development issues.
- The Giant.Exchange creation experience to be used in the development of Giant.Bet - a platform of cryptocurrency sports betting.
References
- Giant, Giant Contracts White Paper https://giantpay.network/GiantContractsWhitepaper.pdf
- Giant, Giant Blockchain: The Best Features of Dash and Ethereum https://giantpay.network/pages/giant-blockchain-the-best-features-of-dash-and-ethereum
- Giant, Scaling the Giant Network: The Destruction of Smart Contracts https://giantpay.network/pages/scaling-the-giants-network-the-destruction-of-smart-contracts
- Fortune, Bloomberg Adds Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple to Its Terminal http://fortune.com/2017/12/14/bloomberg-ethereum/
- Giant, Burning Fees to Counter Cryptocurrency Inflation https://giantpay.network/pages/burning-fees-to-counter-cryptocurrency-inflation
- Giant Whitepaper https://giantpay.network/GiantExchangeWhitepaper.pdf
- The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Binary Options Fraud https://www.investor.gov/investing-basics/avoiding-fraud/types-fraud/binary-options-fraud