{"id":18126,"date":"2020-11-25T21:42:24","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T21:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=18126"},"modified":"2020-11-26T20:49:49","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T20:49:49","slug":"coinbase-drops-margin-trading-because-bitcoin-doesnt-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2020\/11\/25\/coinbase-drops-margin-trading-because-bitcoin-doesnt-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"Coinbase drops margin trading \u2014 because Bitcoin doesn’t scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margin trading<\/a> is when you borrow to multiply the effect of your trading \u2014 so rather than just having $100 to trade with, you can borrow and trade with $200, using the $100 as collateral. If your trade pays off, you\u2019ve done really well! If it doesn’t pay off, you lose your collateral.<\/p>\n

Coinbase used to offer margin trading on Coinbase Pro. You could borrow US dollars, or the USDC stablecoin, from Coinbase, and use it to margin trade at up to 3\u00d7 leverage. [FAQ <\/i>as of August<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

But Coinbase has withdrawn its margin trading product, as of today, 25 November. Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer, says that this is due to “new guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.” [blog post<\/i><\/a>; <\/i>FAQ<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

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That “new guidance” would be the March 2020 CFTC guidance<\/a> specifying that physical delivery of crypto-assets won on a margin bet takes place when the customer controls the asset, and the seller doesn’t. That would be when the customer controls the keys, and that requires the transaction to be on the coin’s blockchain. [Federal Register<\/a><\/i>]<\/p>\n

This is pretty simple, clear and obvious \u2014 you’re margin-trading a commodity, and at some point that ends in delivering the commodity.<\/p>\n

Why is this only happening now? Because of COVID-19, the new rule wasn\u2019t published in the Federal Register until 24 June. Add 90 days for the rule to take effect, then 60 days to implement, and we’re at November.<\/p>\n

Mind you, this rule was first proposed in December 2017 \u2014 so it’s not like Coinbase didn’t see this coming. There’s a pile of market shenanigans the CFTC wasn’t so happy about at the time: [CFTC<\/i><\/a>, 2017<\/i>]<\/p>\n

Beyond their practical and speculative functions, the emergence of these nascent markets has also been negatively marked by a variety of retail customer harm that warrants the Commission\u2019s attention, including, among other things, flash crashes and other market disruptions,52<\/sup> delayed settlements,53<\/sup> alleged spoofing,54<\/sup> hacks,55<\/sup> alleged internal theft,56<\/sup> alleged manipulation,57<\/sup> smart contract coding vulnerabilities,58<\/sup> bucket shop arrangements and other conflicts of interest.59<\/sup> These types of activities perpetrated by bad actors can inhibit market-enhancing innovation, undermine market integrity, and stunt further market development.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coinbase doesn’t go into detail in the announcement as to what’s so hard about implementing physical settlement \u2014 but when the CFTC was considering the rule, Coinbase’s submission to the CFTC said that their internal systems use a ledger in an ordinary database … because the Bitcoin blockchain couldn’t possibly scale to their transaction load.<\/p>\n

(Note that Coinbase didn’t offer margin trading at the time \u2014 they only added margin trading when the proposed rule about physical delivery was already in the air.)<\/p>\n

“For technological and practical reasons, Coinbase uses an internal ledger to show changes in ownership in the majority of conversion services and GDAX transactions.” (GDAX was the old name for Coinbase Pro.) [CTFC<\/i><\/a>, 2018, PDF<\/i>]<\/p>\n

That is: the fabulous technological innovation of Blockchain is so universally applicable to businesses of all sorts, that it can’t even scale up to Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

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Coinbase told the CFTC that their internal systems use a ledger in an ordinary database … because the Bitcoin blockchain couldn’t possibly scale to their transaction load.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,74,167,288,1080],"class_list":["post-18126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-bitcoin","tag-blockchain","tag-cftc","tag-coinbase","tag-trading"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/coinbase-logo-header.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18126"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18155,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18126\/revisions\/18155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}