Binance Launches Leveraged YFI Contracts After Prices Top $38,000

Binance Futures will launch a new YFI/USDT perpetual contract, with trading starting on Aug 31 at 07:00 AM (UTC). The announcement added that the contract is a USDT-margined futures contract that uses Tether as collateral. It also stated that traders will be able to access up to 50x leverage on the new contract.

#Binance Futures Will Launch @iearnfinance $YFI USDT-Margined Perpetual Contract With Up to 50x Leverage

➡️https://t.co/ZdOAPJYecz pic.twitter.com/lbuJUcO7ll

— Binance (@binance) August 31, 2020

A perpetual contract, or swap, is essentially a futures contract with no expiry or settlement, and it has a number of advantages over other futures or options instruments. This type of contract gives traders the ability to use leverage cheaply and easily and liquidity on perpetual swaps is usually much higher to boot. Perpetual swap markets are maintained in value by requiring that traders hold enough of the underlying asset to cover their orders, in this case, USDT. It should be noted that using leverage on volatile markets is extremely high-risk since small changes in prices can quickly result in liquidation. Observers in the crypto community have already started talking about a YFI dump due to the ability to short it now, but the total opposite appears to be happening. Yearn Finance’s YFI token is the hottest thing in crypto at the moment. It was just less than weeks ago when YFI prices first topped $10,000. At that time there were cheers from the sidelines hoping that a big move would push the YFI price over the price of a single BTC. Fast forward to today and YFI prices have surged to their highest levels ever, briefly topping $38,000 on Aug 30.

These numbers corrected back down to $32,000 by Monday morning’s Asian trading session, but the momentum is all one way for this DeFi darling. Yearn Finance got a further boost over the weekend when money market protocol Aave listed YFI. Aave is the world’s leading DeFi platform in terms of total value locked (TVL) which is currently around $1.67 billion. Because there are only 30,000 tokens in circulation, the demand for YFI by yield farmers has been astounding and has resulted in five-figure gains in just a couple of weeks.