Delta Exchange’s Pankaj Balani: Building a Crypto Derivatives Exchange for Global Scale.

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Pankaj Balani, CEO and co-founder of Delta Exchange. They discuss the differences between derivatives exchanges vs traditional exchanges, market stability, current engineering challenges, and more.

Episode Highlights:

• Pankaj began in derivatives trading in Hong Kong before moving into hedge funds.
• Pankaj believes his old colleagues view crypto as another asset class and are receptive to it.
• The reaction has been positive to the recent Supreme Court decision in India to lift the ban on banks handling cryptocurrencies.
• There has been significant growth in crypto in India in the last 2-3 months, more than many other markets have seen.
• Even in the US, a lot of the major banks are difficult to work within crypto.
• More and more people are viewing Bitcoin as a stable investment.
• Delta’s focus is on retail and professional traders; there is a demand for hedging, but there is more demand for speculation.
• They have more coins listed with them than any other peer exchange.
• Delta plans to launch a product that marries DeFi and CeFi
• They realized they had to build technology that could monitor as many as 100 coins over every customer throughout the day’s fluctuations.
• These engineering challenges are comparable to the engineering challenges in video streaming.
• Pankaj doesn’t attribute the current market fluctuations entirely to coronavirus but it’s certainly a factor.

Key Points:

1. The lack of cooperation from major banks has held the development of crypto back.
2. No one in the derivatives space has truly solved the problem of scale across multiple assets.
3. Trading on futures is necessary in crypto.

Quotes

• “The genesis of derivative products, the need, it basically arose from the fact that people need to protect themselves against price movements.” –Pankaj Balani

• “We are always very available to any kind of discussions. That’s the beauty of working in cryptos—you run a company and you’re interacting with your customers.” –Pankaj Balani

Support The Show

• ZenLedger is the official tax software of Chain Reaction for crypto investors and accountants. Get a 15% discount when you use code Chain15.
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Resources Mentioned:

• Chain Reaction Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainpodcast
• Tom Shaughnessy Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shaughnessy119
• ZenLedger is the official tax software of Chain Reaction for crypto investors and accountants. Get a 15% discount when you use code Chain15.