YFI has undoubtedly been the best performing cryptocurrency of the past month in terms of pricing.
The governance token of Yearn Finance was announced on July 17th by Andre Cronje and has since taken off in a way no one probably expected.
What started as a “0 value” token is currently trading at around $36,000 and has become the first altcoin since 2016 to flip Bitcoin’s dollar value. Now, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has launched YFI futures contracts, allowing traders to open leveraged positions.
Hours ago, Binance Futures, the cryptocurrency derivatives arm of Binance, announced the launch of the YFI/USDT perpetual contract. Trading opened today at 7:00 AM UTC, and users are now able to open both long and short positions with leverage of up to 50x.
Despite the few short hours since the contract has launched, it already has a volume of about 1,500 YFI, which is roughly around $53 million at the time of this writing. In other words – the demand for the contract is undeniably substantial.
In essence, Binance’s perpetual contracts are regular futures contracts but with no expiration date. This means that traders can open and close them whenever they see fit.
Up until this moment, users who wanted to speculate on YFI’s price only had the opportunity to do so for when the price was going up. In other words, there was no mechanism to effectively bet on YFI’s price going down than to essentially sit on other cryptocurrencies.
Now, traders can open short positions, meaning that they can effectively bet on its price going down.
Of course, it’s important to outline that the same goes for opening leveraged long positions. People can now place much larger orders with a lot less capital because of the high leverage.
However, there are plenty of people who might feel like the price of YFI is inflated well beyond the boundaries of what’s accepted. After all, the token did start as a “0 value.” However, its first positive hourly candle on Uniswap closed at around $120, and given its current price of about $36,000, this means that the returns are at a factor of 300x.
Yet, other industry proponents believe that its price might be accurate because of the particularly small circulating supply of 30,000 YFI tokens, making it very scarce.
In any case, using high leverage puts your capital at much greater risk, and you should never trade with money that you can’t afford to lose, regardless of your bias.