Best crypto derivatives exchanges to use in 2023

In any financial market, derivatives are a critical tool. From stocks and commodities to precious metals and bonds, derivatives are an important financial instrument that helps investors to optimize their profitability — albeit at a greater risk as well.

And with the crypto space currently seeing tremendous growth, derivatives have also become an all-important instrument for traders. With derivatives, traders can employ various strategies to speculate and manage their positions. Many traders have made life-changing money by trading derivatives, and these tools are not new to the market. However, like many other sophisticated financial instruments, it is important that you only deal with these tools as a professional trader.

If you’re looking to explore the crypto derivatives market, then you’d need an exchange that allows you to do so conveniently. Some of the best traditional crypto exchanges offer support for derivatives products, while others usually focus more on trading these instruments directly.

In this article, we’ll look into some of the best platforms that support traders looking to play in the crypto derivatives market:

Bitget

Bitget is a top three cryptocurrency trading platform in terms of derivative trading volume, which touts itself as being able to offer the lowest trading fees on the market. With a focus on both new and experienced traders, the platform ensures that anyone can log in to its platform and optimize their profitability.

To facilitate trading, the Bitget derivatives platform offers access to a broad feature set. These include copy trading, which allows users to find experienced traders and essentially copy their trades. Its copy trading service already serves over 80,000 traders and 338,000 copy users, all of whom have so far completed over 42 million profitable trades, as of December 2022. There are a few other platforms that are also starting to support copy trading, but by far Bitget is the largest copy trading platform in the crypto space.

Other impressive features of the exchange include Trading Insights and Strategy Plaza. Insights help to solve the information gap that is currently available in the trading space, allowing investors to get access to high-quality market analysis and recommendations that can help to improve the accuracy of their trades. With Strategy Plaza users can adopt and apply specific strategies set by top-performing experts. 

The objective of Bitget is to help its users get a “first-mover advantage” over other traders. They can find effective trading strategies and references, while also sifting through a maze of helpful data that can help to optimize their trading activities.

With optimal liquidity and a depth of open contracts, Bitget is one place where investors and traders would definitely like to be.

Binance

Binance is already the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the market by daily trading volumes. And, part of the platform’s appeal is its provision of tools that pretty much appeal to all investors — including derivatives traders.

With Binance, you will have no issues with transferring funds between your spot account and derivatives account. On that note alone, you can take advantage of arbitrage trading opportunities. The exchange allows you to access multiple derivatives products, including but not limited to USD-margined futures contracts, coin-margined futures contracts, leveraged tokens, Binance Options, and more.

Fees on Binance are quite reasonable. The exchange doesn’t charge for depositing funds, and fees can vary between 0.01% and 0.05% of your transaction value. Just as well, you can enjoy up to 50% discounts on fees if you make payments using Binance’s in-house BNB token. With optimal support and security, Binance offers something for everybody.

ByBit

ByBit is a specialized trading platform and brokerage service that focuses more on derivatives markets. Established in 2018, the platform offers different derivatives platforms, including USD-margined perpetual swaps, coin-margined inverse perpetual products, and coin-margined inverse futures tools.

With ByBit, you can access delivery contracts that are settled in cash and even cryptocurrencies even though the platform hasn’t necessarily been in the market for long, it offers a beginner-friendly interface as well as a suite of products that can easily cater to the needs of derivatives traders.

With the ability to process tens of thousands of transactions a second, ByBit offers enough functionality for both retail and institutional traders. As explained earlier, the exchange is viable for both beginner and veteran traders. As a bonus traders can also access educational resources to help them learn more about the market.

Trading fees on ByBit are pegged at 0.075% of the transaction value from market takers, while market makers get rewarded with 0.025% of the trade value.

MEXC global

MEXC Global is another relatively new exchange that has focused primarily on finding low-cap assets in their incubation stage. The exchange has been making waves among crypto developers, getting the first crack at listing them and allowing investors to grow their appetite organically for the coins.

Also established in 2018, MEXC currently has over 6 million users and is available in over 200 countries. As part of its offerings, the exchange also provides access to derivatives products - especially in many of its new, low-ap coins.

With MEXC Global, traders are limited primarily to perpetual contracts. They can also access margin on these contracts with leverage of up to 125x. The exchange allows you to access both coin-margined and USDT-margined contacts, with trading fees for perpetual contracts on the platform being pegged at 0.02% for makers and 0.06% for takers.

User experience on MEXC Global is quite impressive, with the platform being available on all major operating systems. Considering that many of these low-cap coins tend to offer higher levels of profitability, MEXC Global is another exchange that has caught the eyes of many value-seeking derivatives traders.