Currently, Binance is offering in beta mode, margin trading on its exchange Binance.com as part of their re-designed UX/UI (Binance 2.0) for this platform. Notably, this feature will not be available to all of Binance’s customers most those based in the United States.
That Binance was planning to offer margin trading was discovered by Reddit user “enriquejr99” who claimed to be a computer programmer while experimenting with Binance’s public application programming interface (API).
He made known his findings on March 20th on Reddit through a thread titled “Research: Margin trading features found on Binance API”.
According to Cointelegraph, on March 21st, Binance “first promised in the feature rollout section of its white paper that margin trading would be implemented after spot trading and before futures on its exchange.”
It is worthy of note that on May 1, Reddit user “lifofifo” found out while examining the Binance API that the binary switch “isMarginTradingAllowed” had been enabled for the following 9 pairs: BTC-USDT; BNB-BTC; BNB-USDT; ETH-BTC; ETH-USDT; TRX-BTC; TRX-USDT; XRP-BTC; and XRP-USDT. He took this as a sign that “margin trading is coming soon to Binance.”
Around 03:00 UTC on May 8th, during a Periscope Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, CZ confirmed that the rumors about margin trading on Binance.com were true:
“I think most people have already seen the margin flags edit in our API. Yes, we are working on a margin [trading] system that’s rolling out actually very, very soon. We are going to first roll out [this system] to a few of our key clients, the large traders, so that they can help us test. They also have an agreement with us that, if there’s a bug or something else [in the system], they will work closely with us [to fix those]. We will do a gradual rollout of the margin platform.”
The Block reported that during a “The Scoop” podcast interview on May 29th, with Senior Correspondent Frank Chaparro, Emilie Choi, the former VP of Business, Data & International at Coinbase had said that Coinbase is planning to add “leveraged trading”:
“Margin lend borrow is definitely going to be a next big step for us, especially on the active trader side… We still need to figure that out because there’s not a lot of regulatory clarity there right now in the US. And so that that is being discussed.”