Any financial advisor will tell you that futures trading is a risky investment decision.
Disclaimer: This article was provided by the Vanbex Group. Bitcoinist is not affiliated with the firms represented by the Vanbex Group and is not responsible for their products and/or services.
Secure Bitcoin Futures Trading With Crix
When combining futures trading with Bitcoin and digital currency exchanges with sub-par security, the risk to the trader is exponentially greater.
However, Bitcoin and digital currency futures exchange Crix.io helps mitigate both problems so customers can trade with greater trust and peace of mind.
When trading futures, there is worry over the value of your investment falling before your contract’s maturity date, which also makes it difficult to pay back any leverage you may have had with the exchange.
What’s worse is that many bitcoin exchanges don’t have stop-loss measures in place, which have led to large rounds of margin calling, producing intense “flash crashes” in the bitcoin price.
Dmitry Koval, founder of Crix, said in a previous interview that the shorter contract term — three hours, 24 hours — is the “trade-off for totally mitigated slippage risk and full transparency of all the calculations.”
Furthermore, margin calls are prevented by setting particular trading rules.
Prices throughout the session, whether for a three hour or 24-hour contract, are limited to model-predicted limits so a trader cannot place an order priced outside of these limits, said Koval.
“Therefore, none of the traders can lose more than their initial collateral during the session.”
But there is also the threat of hacking and security breaches.
Theft is unfortunately a common occurrence on bitcoin exchanges, so much so that it has significantly influenced negative perceptions of Bitcoin.
Mt. Gox, for example, suffered a security breach in which 850,000 bitcoins suddenly vanished from the exchange’s coffers in 2014.
Being the largest bitcoin exchange in the world at the time, Mt. Gox’s breach was plastered all over mainstream media, painting Bitcoin as an insecure, criminal hot-spot.
In the years since, other exchanges have also been hacked due to weak security, resulting in untold losses. This is a turn-off for a segment of investors and traders, especially those on the fringes just considering whether to get into the cryptocurrency space.
Recognizing these risks, Crix made an effort to create a bitcoin futures platform as secure as possible.
Using sophisticated security architecture, a proprietary algorithm for private key storage, as well as cold storage and virtualized key servers, Crix offers a storage solution that makes potential attackers unable to locate private keys to any bitcoin wallet.
To protect its website from DDoS attacks, Crix uses CloudFlare combined with firewall functionality. The exchange also safeguards data passing through its website with SSL encryption.
Security solutions from Arbor Networks and F5 Networks further secure the overall platform. Additionally, Crix says that all “software components are virtualized,” and that “hardware is hosted at a Tier 3 data center,” with “extremely high levels of availability.”
To ensure everything was truly in order, Crix enlisted the services of Cobalt, a San Francisco-based online security firm, to test their infrastructure’s protection against vulnerabilities.
Cobalt subjected Crix to it’s signature “crowdsourced penetration testing.” After a rigorous, ten-day course of manual testing and review by a third-party security team, Cobalt concluded that Crix’s security was robust.
Cobalt COO Jakob Storm said, “The penetration test confirmed that Crix.io … had good security controls in place [and] … No high severity vulnerabilities were identified.”
The security team also noted, it was evident the platform’s application was written by a team with security expertise.
After passing the audit, Storm said that Crix “initiated a bug bounty program” to ensure the longevity of their security measures. “A bug bounty program is a great way to continuously get exposure from skilled researchers,” noted Storm.
When asked for advice on web-security, Storm recommended periodic penetration testing.
“A live application is a very dynamic thing,” Storm said, “it changes over time when the new features are introduced and environments are updated.”
Concluding, Storm remarked, “A general recommendation is to do, minimum, two [penetration] tests per year per application.”
While it’s impossible to fully eliminate the financial risk exposure of futures trading, the Crix platform is a start. With its Cobalt-verified security, model predicted limits and transparent protocol, the digital currency exchange and futures contract platform is one of the most accessible and secure environment investors and traders can enjoy on the market today.
Visit Crix.io to review the platform and what it can offer.
Images courtesy of Crix.io.