Futures and Holding Wallets

What is the difference between Futures and Holding Wallets?

Your Crypto Facilities account comes with different wallets, which are either Holding Wallets (cash accounts) or Futures Wallets (margin accounts). If you make a deposit, it will arrive in your holding wallet (cash account), and you can withdraw only from holding wallets. You own four holding wallets:

If you wish to trade an instrument, you first need to make an internal transfer from a holding wallet to a futures wallet that belongs to that instrument. You own a futures wallet (margin account) for each instrument we list:

What is the reason for segregating accounts?

Any bitcoins or Ripple XRP that sit in your cash accounts do not count as margin, meaning you cannot lose them if a trade turns against you.

Deposits made to one of your futures wallets count as margin and could be lost if a trade turns against you. Futures wallets are separate for each instrument to assure that there is no spill-over effect between positions in different instrument. 

Futures wallets are completely independent - if you are margin called in one account, this has no effect on the other futures wallets. You can decide yourself how much margin you want to allocate to each futures wallet (minimum margin requirements apply).

Can I use different currencies for margin?

Currently you may only lodge collateral in the asset specified for the futures wallet. This means you can not use XRP, ETH, or LTC in the XBTUSD contracts. This is to avoid the need to rely on liquidity between assets to properly value net collateral. By only using the base or quote currency as collateral, the risk is atomically measured and it can be ensured there are no system leakages.