Rumors are circulating about a possible launch of a crypto derivatives exchange by Arkham Intelligence next month.
The rumor was published a few days ago by Bloomberg, and for now, it has not yet been officially confirmed by the company.
The Arkham Intelligence Project
Arkham Intelligence is a company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze on-chain crypto transactions.
Its platform was founded in 2020 by Miguel Morel, and it is famous mainly because it allows the monitoring of the wallets of some large entities, such as MicroStrategy or Mt. Gox.
Among the investors who funded the project are Tim Draper and Joe Lonsdale of Palantir Technologies, as well as one of the co-founders of OpenAI.
Over the years, the Arkham Intelligence platform has enabled the tracking of significant wallet movements, such as those of FTX, and in some cases even stolen funds.
The bull exchange of derivatives
The crypto derivatives are the trading instrument preferred by speculators.
In fact, the trading volumes on crypto derivatives exchanges far exceed those of spot exchanges.
For example, the daily spot trading volume on Binance is about 17 billion dollars, while the daily derivatives trading volume on the same exchange approaches 64 billion.
The reason for the great success of crypto derivatives is twofold.
First of all, with futures, it is also possible to easily bet on the downside by opening short positions, while in spot markets it is definitely more difficult to do so.
But probably the most attractive thing for speculators is leveraged margin trading, which allows borrowing funds from the platform to place bets of greater magnitude than what could be done using only one’s own funds.
Although leveraged positions necessarily involve a greater risk, especially when the leverage is high, they are very popular with short or very short-term speculators, because in theory they can allow for much greater gains, even though they come with a much greater risk of losing all the capital wagered.
All this has led to derivatives exchanges becoming the focal point of crypto speculation.
The crypto derivatives exchange signed by Arkham Intelligence
The indiscretion from Bloomberg is not yet confirmed.
This means that, in fact, the details of Arkham Intelligence’s project to open its own crypto derivatives exchange are not yet known.
Moreover, Bloomberg cites a person familiar with the matter as a source, but anonymous, so it is not even certain that the rumor corresponds to the truth. However, the company has not denied the rumor, and this suggests that there might be some truth to it.
The only two details revealed by Bloomberg are that the new Arkham derivatives exchange will seek to compete with giants like Binance in the retail investor/speculator market, and that it will not be available for US users.
On the other hand, a few months ago CEO Miguel Morel had stated that the company is looking for new ways to monetize the platform, while keeping the main functions free.
The price of the ARKM (Arkham) token after the news on the derivatives exchange
In July of last year, the native token of the Arkham Intel Exchange, ARKM, was launched on the crypto markets.
It is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain that debuted with a price of about $0.6.
Until October of last year, its price had fallen, reaching a historic low below $0.3, but with the bull run at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024, it managed not only to climb back above the initial $0.6 but also to set a historic high in March of this year at nearly $4.
The one in February, which caused its price to rise by as much as 340% in just one month, was in every respect a parabolic growth, ending before mid-March.
At that point, an inevitable correction occurred, which, however, did not bring the price back to the initial $0.6.
The subsequent low was indeed higher than $0.9, and it was recorded in August.
Moreover, since then its price has almost doubled again, given that today it is above $1.8.
It should therefore be considered a still speculative token, with high volatility even if perhaps not extremely high, for the crypto markets. The fact that the current price is almost three times higher than the initial price of just over a year ago, however, speaks volumes about the potential it has to become something more than just a speculative token.
