Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Kraken, one of the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges, said it has started offering ether (ETH) dark pool trading option.
According to Kraken’s blog, this would allow its clients to discreetly place large ether orders without exposing their intentions to the public, lit order book, and take advantage of reduced market impact and better price for large blocks. The minimum order can be for 50 bitcoin or 2500 ether.
Kraken clients will now have access to six ether dark pool currency pairs, with the option to exchange ether for bitcoin (ETH/XBT.d), euro (ETH/EUR.d), United States dollar (ETH/USD.d), Canadian dollar (ETH/CAD.d), pound sterling (ETH/GBP.d), and Japanese yen (ETH/JPY.d). As with other Kraken dark pools, the Ether Dark Pool trading fees range from 0.20% to 0.36%, depending on trade volume.
Since its launch in July 2015 Ethereum, the cryptocurrency decentralized platform that generates the token unit ether, has gained significant popularity and the ether became the second most valuable cryptocurrency after the bitcoin. Since the beginning of this year the ether’s value increased ten times and it has reached a current market capitalization of over $700 million.
Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, explained that this is one of the reasons the company has decided to offer dark pool trading of ether. “This year, trading volume for ether has dramatically increased on Kraken’s exchange, and we developed the Ether Dark Pool to bridge the gap between our lit order books and over-the-counter desk,” said Powell.
Dark pools are a term used for private exchanges or forums for trading securities that, unlike stock exchanges, are not accessible by the investing public. Also known as “dark pools of liquidity,” they are so named for their complete lack of transparency. Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors, who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and consequently obtain adverse prices for their trades.
Kraken also announced changes to their Margin Trading program. They increased leverage for ETH/XBT (up from 2.5x to 4x) and the addition of support to three pairs: ETH/EUR, XBT/USD and ETH/USD, all with up to 3x leverage. Ether will also become a collateral currency, meaning that now a client’s ETH balance can be used (in addition to XBT, EUR, and USD) as collateral for the advanced (borrowed) funds tied to a leveraged margin trade. Margin trading remains unavailable to US residents at this time.
Founded in 2011, San Francisco-based Kraken is the largest bitcoin exchange in euro volume and liquidity and also trading the cryptocurrency litecoin, Canadian dollars, US dollars, British pounds and Japanese yen.
Meanwhile, the forex broker FXOpen launched trading in ether. The cryptocurrency was also added to the trading portfolio of one of the largest Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges – bitFlyer.
