Roger Ver planning Bitcoin Cash derivatives platform to overtake XRP and ETH
Roger Ver is stepping up his efforts to promote the adoption of Bitcoin Cash. After quitting as CEO of Bitcoin.com to be part of its executive board, “Bitcoin Jesus” has abandoned the "Bitcoin kills babies" rhetoric to focus on what really matters: Money.
Yesterday, David Shin, head of the Bitcoin.com crypto exchange, talked to Bloomberg about the Ver-backed firm's intentions to create a BCH derivatives platform, establishing partnerships with CFTC-regulated exchanges.
Bitcoin.com, though, isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel here. The plan, it appears, is to do essentially what BitMEX does for Bitcoin. “BitMEX offers several of its trading products in the form of a Futures Contract with cash settlement,” the exchange explains in its futures guide. (Ver did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on the new product.)
Nevertheless, Shin is sure that BCH derivatives will make the token appealing to institutional investors: "We'll try to list a BCH future on one of these exchanges that's CFTC regulated to, therefore, have a product that can be traded into the U.S. with institutional traders," he told Bloomberg. "In theory, we should see more penetration, more users, more trading, and more volume."
The scheme appears to follow the "if it worked for BTC, it can work for BCH" playbook that Ver has laid out as of late. Just this past May, Ver launched the controversial “Local Bitcoin” exchange, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin Cash trading platform curiously similar—even in the name—to LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading platform.
"It's good marketing," Ver told Decrypt at the time. "It explains clearly what we are doing." And it seems like the strategy worked.
A few months later, he launched the Bitcoin.com exchange, with BCH as the first option, of course. To promote the platform and take a piece of the market share from other more popular exchanges, Ver is actually paying those currently using the platform with a system of negative fees.
If this BCH-focused BitMEX clone becomes a reality, practically every strategy that worked for Bitcoin (BTC) would now have a BCH equivalent. The Bitcoin.com team appears confident that this will boost not only adoption of Bitcoin Cash, but more to the point, its place on the market-cap leaderboard:
"Within a year I want to make that the second- or third-largest market cap," Shin said. "To get from No. 4 to No. 3 or No. 2, we have to see more volume."
Quite an ambitious goal, especially considering that BCH would have to double its market cap to overtake XRP and practically quadruple it to overtake Ethereum.
And this ain't 2017 anymore.
